10 · CHANGELOG

Changelog

This site is updated in small, frequent steps: new material, corrections, more language editions, changes to how things are presented. This log records substantive changes to content — additions, corrections, restructuring — by date, so that anyone citing the site can check which version a given statement belongs to. Purely cosmetic tweaks and deployment work are not listed individually. For change-by-change detail see the GitHub repository commit history (public, timestamped); each past version can also be verified through the Internet Archive snapshots.

This page last updated: 8 August 2026

8 August 2026

The 1991 exhibition goes live in seven more languages and is cross-linked across the site; new holding PH-034 and a holdings band; fixes from the Codex eight-language review; the Beidaihe photograph re-dated; the Taiwanese guest’s toast finalised; three batches of fixes from the three-model review panel, covering language and object-level cataloguing of the film; the Singapore prelude switched to full NewspaperSG pages; clippings replaced with high-resolution scans; five more newspaper pages added to the Singapore timeline and eight catalogued in the archive; the run restated as 21 days; two exhibitions renamed and their titles switched to numerals; the Sihanouk banquet order form published; a 9 September aftermath entry added; two curatorial positions made explicit; and English editions of the changelog and teaching resources

Japanese edition — profile1991-ja.html is live. All 154 text blocks translated one by one; units, footnotes and time-code jumps correspond exactly to the Chinese master. Header, footer and other shell elements reuse the existing translations from the same-language 1959 page rather than being translated again. The subtitle track remains Chinese, labelled as such.
Korean edition — profile1991-ko.html is live, translated block by block, with units and footnotes matching the Chinese master.
All seven translations complete — the French, German, Spanish and Korean editions go live together; with the earlier traditional Chinese and Japanese, the 1991 exhibition now exists in eight editions. Each has all 154 text blocks translated individually, with unit counts, footnote counts and time-code jumps matching the Chinese master; the alignment tool passes on all seven.
Language switcher and sister-exhibition buttons — each edition’s language menu now points to that page’s own editions; sister-exhibition buttons that previously fell back to English with a language note now point to the matching language.
Cross-linking — the central idea of the exhibition is left alone; what the film names is connected to what the site already holds: Xirongxian Hutong to the 1959 exhibition’s premises section; the two dishes the narration mentions to their own pages; the leaders it names to the Life and Era page; the 1991 cookbook to its catalogue card; the 1992 honour to the award photographs in the archive; and the 1987 Singapore trip to that exhibition. Synchronised across all eight editions.
Yang Jianmin’s career filled in — the note identifying this interviewee now records that he led the Sichuan Restaurant from 1991 and later rose to vice-president of the BTG group; the Lineage page already carries an independently sourced card for this, and the text now links to it.
Three translation problems caught by the gate — a deprecated Spanish rendering of caul fat; Chinese enumeration commas left in French, German and Spanish prose; and Chinese text left in footnote aria-labels, which a screen reader would read aloud in Chinese. All fixed, with the assembler hardened accordingly; the rebuild passes clean.
New photograph accessioned — a scan supplied by the family of a group photograph with Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun and restaurant staff. Full image and thumbnail generated to the site’s standard watermark spec, the clean original filed in the unwatermarked backup library and registered with the watermarking tool. Added to the archive as PH-034, with the register row and JSON-LD synchronised across all eight editions. The people were identified by the family and neither date nor occasion is recorded; every edition says so in the notes.
Cited in the 1991 exhibition — the photograph now appears directly after the passage about the leaders’ dealings with the restaurant, with its accession number, in all eight editions.
Holdings band — eight cards added before the coda: the mansion courtyard, the group photograph (PH-034), the two dishes, the cookbook, the lineage, the Singapore exhibition and the 1992 award photographs (PH-004). Where an object image exists it is used as the card face, so a reader can see at a glance what this film reaches across the site. The source note was rewritten when the blue title card was dropped.
Fixes from the Codex eight-language review — a cross-model review of all eight editions turned up: stray button text (“copyright page”) left in the English and traditional Chinese prose when a pill link was removed; the French and Spanish note about the narration adding one character to the book’s title having lost the title itself; a Korean mistranslation turning the World Master Chefs Society into a society of fine liquor; a broken German sentence; the evidence label “unverified” rendered as “pending verification” in Japanese and Korean; and residual Chinese full stops in four editions. The French “le père Chen” was kept after review — it is the ordinary colloquial way of addressing an older man in French, and the editor’s note already explains the register.
The Beidaihe holiday photograph re-dated — the author of Songfeng Ruren questions dating this to 1959. The men wear summer vests; a seaside holiday during the hardship years of 1959–61 would have been out of keeping; and the first visit to Zhongnanhai came in the autumn, when that summer was already past. Working from the menus by which the biography dates the three visits, the most plausible sequence puts it after the third visit in August 1961 — a fourth stint teaching the Chairman’s cooks, and the ten days at Beidaihe the following summer, 1962. Unit 07 of the 1959 exhibition becomes a section about the dating itself: the original caption is reproduced as written and the year marked unverified. The four places that cite it — the exhibition, the home page, the archive and the story gallery — were rewritten to match, in all eight editions.
Arrow links in the 1959 exhibition turned into pills — six “→ see …” text links on the page became pill buttons, in all eight editions.
Singapore 1987: the Taiwanese guest’s toast, finalised — with the recording of the toast now transcribed, the passage was rewritten. The visitors were a delegation of Taiwan’s refrigeration and air-conditioning trade association, with chairman Qian as guest of honour; the host was the Kaili Company (name transliterated, spelling to be confirmed), represented by general manager Zhang and manager Liu. The speaker called it a meeting five years overdue; the state-banquet-grade Sichuan food was prepared by Chen Songru’s team; the delegation brought commemorative gifts from Taipei, and Kaili promised visits and access to materials for the rest of the itinerary. The earlier conjectural account of who invited whom is withdrawn. All eight editions.
Three-model review panel, first batch of fixes — Claude Opus 5, GPT 5.6 Sol and Gemini 3.1 Pro each reviewed the eight editions independently. Fixes: (1) a uniform nine-entry hreflang matrix across all eight editions, and the eight URLs added to the sitemap — five editions had copied their whole language map from the 1959 page while the master and English editions had none, so to a machine this page barely existed; (2) navigation entries labelled “1959” in five editions actually linked here, and no separate 1991 entry existed — both fixed; (3) the note that the quoted passage is this site’s translation added to the Japanese, Korean, French, German and Spanish editions, which had been carrying an undeclared translation under a first-hand-account label; (4) evidence labels invented ad hoc for this page in five editions folded back into the site-wide controlled vocabulary; (5) the disciple surname Yu written with the wrong character in nine places in the traditional Chinese edition, plus thirteen other conversion errors; (6) the year unit in the “kept for N years” line localised — French, German, Spanish and Korean pages had been rendering a Chinese character at runtime.
Review panel, language and cataloguing batch — the central quotation made word-for-word identical wherever it appears in the Japanese and Korean editions, with the Korean summary’s promissory form returned to the wish the man actually expressed; Korean transliteration brought into line with the National Institute of Korean Language; the negative force of the word for “uproar” restored in Spanish, and sentence case applied to Spanish navigation; the unit restored to the film’s running time in German, French and Spanish; narrow no-break spaces completed inside French quotation marks; and the English note about the extra character in the book title now sets the Chinese alongside so the difference can actually be seen. The film itself was given object-level cataloguing: reference AV-007, carrier and extent (VHS, 7 min 33 s, at 28:08–35:41 on the tape), a digitisation statement in the record line, VideoObject structured data in the head, and the original Chinese of the quotation set beside the translation in five editions. All eight editions.
Full front pages of 4 August 1987 published — the prelude entry previously showed only cropped clippings; it now carries the complete front pages of Lianhe Wanbao and Shin Min Daily News for that day, from NewspaperSG at the National Library Board, Singapore, with an outbound pill link. Copyright rests with the original publishers, so no watermark of ours is applied. The full pages show where the two articles actually sat on the front page and how much space they took. The family’s own clippings remain on the archive and news pages. Also fixed: the Japanese and Korean editions had confused Lianhe Wanbao with Lianhe Zaobao, which are different papers. All eight editions.
The two 1987 articles: clippings replaced with high-resolution scans, shown beside the full pages — the clipping images for both articles of 4 August 1987 were replaced with high-resolution scans supplied by the family (roughly double the resolution; the body text can now be read word by word), and updated everywhere they appear. The prelude entry showed all four images together for a time: the two full pages from NewspaperSG and the two family clippings, so a reader could both read the text and see where it sat. All eight editions.
Five more newspaper pages added to Singapore 1987 — a new entry for 5 August 1987 carries the tasting review “Authentic Sichuan: hot but not parching” by Au Fu-lai (Lianhe Wanbao, page 4), which notes such details as the lantern-shadow beef among the eight cold dishes and the Wuliangye served with the meal. Under the entry for the run itself, four pages from the period: Shin Min Daily News of 10 August (Home News 3), Lianhe Wanbao of 12 August (page 7, a full-page feature), Lianhe Zaobao of 22 August (Food World) and the Weekend Teahouse page of 22 August. All are NewspaperSG images with an outbound pill link; copyright rests with the original publishers and no watermark is applied. The family’s clippings are pointed to on the archive page. All eight editions.
Eight NewspaperSG pages catalogued among the clippings — the newspaper pages from the 1987 Singapore run are registered as NC-007 to NC-014: the two front pages of 4 August, the tasting review of 5 August, the full-page advertisement of 10 August, the full-page feature of 12 August, the two pages of 22 August, and the prize draw of 9 September. These are a different kind of thing from NC-001 to NC-006, which are copies of clippings held by the family, so the rights and source fields say what is actually true — copyright with the original publishers, shown here as fair dealing, digital images from NewspaperSG — rather than reusing the wording about copies held by this site.
The Weekend Teahouse page identified — checked against NewspaperSG: it is page 11 of Shin Min Daily News, 22 August 1987. The masthead was not visible on the scan, so only the section name had been recorded; the paper and the writer, Li Lishi, are now given.
The run restated as 21 days — the banner gives 8 August to 28 August 1987, which is 21 calendar days counting both ends. The text had said twenty; it now says 21 throughout. The exhibition title was left unchanged for the moment.
The Singapore exhibition renamed — since the dates on the banner make 21 calendar days, the exhibition title, the counts in the text, navigation entries, sister-exhibition buttons, page titles and structured data were all changed to 21 days, in all eight editions. The page address is unchanged.
The manuscript exhibition switched to a numeral — the title and every reference to it now read “37 Pages”, in all eight editions.
The 1982 Sihanouk banquet order form published — on the Craft and Dishes page, the retained copy of the restaurant’s banquet order form now appears in the banquet-menu section, before the cold and hot dishes: dated 5 November 1982 at the head, the organiser field reading “Director Deng Xiaoping”, eight tables and eighty covers, banquet at noon, the dishes written out one by one. The text had been citing this form as the evidence for the date; readers can now see it. All eight editions.
Exhibition titles switched to numerals — the Singapore exhibition is now written with a numeral, matching “37 Pages”, in all eight editions.
A “9 September 1987 · afterwards” entry added — twelve days after the run closed, Lianhe Wanbao carried the sequel on page 8: the grand prize the China Restaurant had put up was drawn by roulette. The page is side evidence of how the whole thing was run, and wound up, as a commercial promotion on the ground.
The nature of the 1991 film made explicit — it is an in-house model-worker film, the restaurant’s own Party branch filming its own staff, not outside reporting. What it dwells on — past seventy and still at the stove daily, turning down the car and the room — was filmed in 1991 as something to emulate, while this site lists “work placed above health” among the limits he never examined. The narrative was therefore not conferred after his death; it was built and broadcast by his own workplace while he was alive, and the film’s praise should be read with that in view.
The weight of the 5 August 1987 review noted — it is a review written after the meal, neither a memorial piece nor a press release: the first assessment in this site’s holdings written at the time, on the spot, by a working journalist.
Changelog now in English — 12 dated entries, 150 records and 337 text blocks translated one by one; until now an international reader opening this page found only Chinese. A general page assembler was built alongside it: Chinese master text plus a translation map plus the shell from the same language, with internal links redirected to that language and untranslated languages rendered in the menu as “pending” rather than left as dead links.
Teaching resources in traditional Chinese and English — the six-stop curator’s tour, the 85-minute lesson plan and the three student worksheets, all 108 text blocks translated.
Ruby readings in Japanese — 104 ruby annotations added across 13 Japanese pages at the first occurrence of each name: people, dishes and places (Chen Songru, oil-net lantern chicken, Xirongxian Hutong). Only the first occurrence is marked; later ones are left plain.
Compressed passages restored in the English changelog — the gate found content that had been quietly condensed: the list of pages in the five-language repair entry; the two former newspaper names (Nanyang Siang Pau and Sin Chew Jit Poh) in the correction entry; the specific name pairs in the navigation-wording entry; and the four watermark parameters (Noto Serif SC, #96505A, 55 per cent, tiled horizontally) — seven passages in all, each restored. Entry and date-group counts verified at 152/152 and 12/12.
A missing report added to the traditional Chinese committee page — the alignment tool found that committee-zh-tw.html carried one external report fewer than the Chinese master (the 2022 visit with the Junzizhu brand to Xibei); now added.
Work titles marked up with <cite> — 1,662 titles across the site now carry semantic markup: 1,049 in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean editions wrapping the 《…》 brackets, and 613 in the English, French, German and Spanish editions converted from <em>. All 142 distinct <em> contents in the four Latin-script languages were reviewed by hand to separate titles from genuine emphasis: the quotation about the heat not being right in four languages, and the romanisation gloss for 市 in English, remain <em>. The browser default italic on <cite> is switched off, since CJK fonts have no true italic and the synthesised slant looks wrong; Latin-script titles get italics back through a separate class.
Traditional Chinese revised to Taiwan standard — the traditional pages turned out to have been converted with the OpenCC s2t profile (Hong Kong and archaic variants) rather than the Taiwan one, leaving forms that are not Taiwan standard: 爲 (478), 裏 (199), 着 (135), 喫 (127), 麪 (120), 蔘 (87) and 覈 (69), now 為, 裡, 著, 吃, 麵, 參 and 核. Thirty-one over-conversions were corrected: 干 had been turned into 幹 throughout, so 乾燒魚 read 幹燒魚 and 乾豆粉 read 幹豆粉; 發送 had become 髮送; the name 劉精松 had become 劉精鬆; and the adverb 只 had become 隻. Around a hundred vocabulary items were changed to Taiwan usage (網路, 資訊, 影片, 伺服器, 搜尋, 資料庫). All 833 pairs of curly quotation marks were changed to the corner brackets Taiwan uses.
What was deliberately left alone in that revision — items the scanner flagged but which context showed to be correct were kept as they stood: 于建民 (a surname, not 於), 千里馬 and 公里 (a unit of distance, not 裡), 岳強新 (a surname), 黃子云 (a personal name), 若干, 出征, 上游, 泰斗, 伙食, 批准, 允祕 (a Qing prince) and 灶台. 數據 in its numerical sense is used in Taiwan too, so only genuinely mainland collocations were changed (數據庫 to 資料庫); 項目, which appears inside the proper name of the intangible-heritage register, and 點擊 are both current in Taiwan and were left.
Blank screen on mobile fixed — the changelog page showed nothing below the header on a phone. The scroll-reveal used a visibility ratio of 12 per cent, which an element taller than the viewport can never reach: once entries were merged by day, a single entry ran to over 7,000 pixels against an 812-pixel viewport, giving a maximum visible ratio of 11 per cent, so the element stayed at zero opacity for ever. Reveal is now triggered when the element enters the viewport, with no dependence on its height. Every block taller than the viewport was affected, not only the changelog.
Content fingerprints on static assets — the HTML carried no-cache headers but the stylesheet and scripts did not, so a change could leave the browser using the old copy, which is exactly what happened while fixing the blank screen above. All 1,071 CSS and JS references now carry a fingerprint derived from the contents of the file: unchanged files keep the same fingerprint and stay cached, changed files invalidate at once. A tool was added so this need not be tracked by hand.
The two books in the 37-pages exhibition now use pill buttons — The Sichuan Restaurant Cookbook and 160 Authentic Sichuan Dishes had a single expand button reading “view cover and copyright page”; they now have two separate pills, Cover and Copyright page, matching the Craft and Dishes page, and either one opens the image directly. Synchronised across all eight editions, with labels and captions taken from each language’s existing wording.
A hidden rights statement brought back into view — when the Craft and Dishes page moved to pill buttons, the statement that written permission for public digital distribution of the full scans has not been obtained from the publisher or the family was left inside a container set to display:none, so readers never saw it. Thirty-two such statements across the two pages have been moved out of that container and now appear with the book cards.
The mini-programme brought in line with the site — the WeChat mini-programme now follows the wording settled on 7–8 August: two exhibitions renamed (21 Days in Singapore, 37 Pages — 21 places in all); the Singapore event given its full name and banner dates; and the Beidaihe photograph turned into a dating enquiry, with the original caption reproduced and the year marked uncertain, the three arguments and the 1962 summer inference matching the site sentence for sentence.
A fourth exhibition added to the mini-programme: 1991, What Was on His Mind — the film High in Skill, Higher Still in Character plays inline, with six time-coded chapters that seek the player, and six footnotes. The web page carries eight; the mini-programme lacks two — the second source for “model worker” and the two accounts of his people’s-congress seat — because the statements they support have nowhere to attach in the mini-programme. Nothing was invented to fill the gap, and the difference is stated at the foot of the page.
Two full newspaper pages added to the mini-programme Singapore exhibition — the front pages of Lianhe Wanbao and Shin Min Daily News for 4 August 1987 now appear under the prelude entry; and the Taiwanese guest’s toast was replaced with the version transcribed from the recording: a delegation from Taiwan’s refrigeration and air-conditioning trade association, its chairman Qian, the Kaili company, and a meeting five years late.
A claim of uniqueness no longer held, and was corrected — with the 1991 film public, the statement that the passage in which he speaks into the microphone is the only recording of his voice is no longer true; it now reads one of two. Corrected on both the site and the mini-programme. Any statement of the form “the only” or “the first” has to be rechecked whenever new material arrives, or it quietly becomes false.
Fifty places where “twenty days” had been missed — when the run was restated as 21 days, only the Singapore exhibition itself was changed. The same wording survived on the archive, story, 37-pages, 1959 and 1991 pages — fifty places across eight languages — contradicting both the exhibition’s own title and the banner dates. Now corrected in each language. Two kinds were left deliberately: the committee page quotes the commemorative documentary’s subtitle verbatim, and changing a quotation would falsify it; the same applies to the changelog entries that describe the renaming itself.
An inconsistent Japanese exhibition name — the Japanese edition of the Singapore exhibition titles itself 獅城21日, but the 1959, 37-pages and 1991 pages linked to it as 獅子の街の二十日間, matching neither the name nor the number. Eight occurrences unified.
The Japanese and traditional Chinese versions of footnote 6 — the change from “the only recording of his voice” to “one of two” had reached the Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish and Korean editions but not the Japanese or traditional Chinese ones, which still read “the only”. Both now corrected, with the pointer to the 1991 film added.
Companion-exhibition links now give the full title — the buttons that carry a reader between the four exhibitions used short forms (37 Pages, 21 Days in Singapore); they now give the full title (37 Pages: The Sichuan Cuisine He Wrote by Hand; 21 Days in Singapore: The 1987 Footage), 78 places across eight languages, each language’s full title taken from its own page rather than translated afresh. Three cross-language errors were fixed at the same time: companion buttons on foreign-language pages that pointed at the Chinese page. The four exhibitions in the mini-programme were changed to full titles too.
A broken language switcher on the traditional Chinese 1991 page — the “简体中文” and “English” entries in its language menu both pointed back at the traditional page, so a reader could not switch away. The assembler had rewritten internal links to the same language and caught the language menu along with them. Fixed, and a check added to the terminology gate so the same fault cannot pass again.

7 August 2026

The 1991 exhibition goes live: source restored, the film fully transcribed, self-rendered subtitles, a six-chapter index, and several rounds of refinement

Broken IIIF manifest fixed — the IIIF Presentation 3.0 manifest advertised on the manuscript exhibition page was returning 404. The file itself was fine (41 pages, valid), but a wildcard rule in .gitignore *.json had kept it out of the repository, so it was never deployed. The ignore rule is fixed, and the manifest now also carries seeAlso pointing to the collection registry and the checksum list. The machine-readable entry point the site advertised now genuinely works.
Overstatement in the English edition corrected — the Chinese reads “one of the founders of state-banquet Sichuan cuisine”; the English opening screen had dropped the qualifier and read “Founder of…”, with several metadata fields saying “pioneer of” — seven places in all. All now read “One of the founders of state-banquet Sichuan cuisine”, matching the strength of the claim in Chinese.
English site name standardised — five different spellings were in use, one of them, “Bawei Songru”, a straightforward pinyin error for bǎi. Twenty-five English pages, including the sixteen recipe pages, now use Baiwei Songru consistently, matching the suggested citation form on the About page — which matters for library cataloguing and academic citation.
Evidence labels made legible — “biography paraphrase”, the label a reader most needs to notice, sat at 2.90:1 against the paper background, below the 4.5:1 required for small text. The one caution that most needed to be seen was the hardest to read. It now uses a deeper gold at 5.75:1, and small light-background text in table headers and captions was darkened to 6.26:1. Gold on dark backgrounds is unaffected.
Held and sought items separated in the archive table — the figure of 61 items included things known to exist but not yet obtained or licensed, which made the number unreliable. The four sought items (MS-002, CE-001, CE-003, CE-004) are now marked with a dashed rule, a legend above the table states plainly “57 held or licensed, 4 sought”, and the downloadable collection-registry.csv gains a holding-status column. Consistent across all eight editions.
Object-level rights statements added to two exhibitions — the manuscript and Singapore exhibitions carried only page-level meta tags, so a visitor zooming into the manuscript or playing the film saw no rights information at all. Each now has a section setting out ownership of the object, who did the digitisation, the rightsstatements.org standard statement and whether reuse is permitted. The Singapore exhibition further notes that the venue photographs are press copyright and that reuse must be arranged with the original rights holder.
Claims that outran the evidence corrected — the Singapore page had said in the site’s own voice that the whole city took notice; it now states the fact (the length of the run). The claim that local papers called him a national-treasure master is now explicitly attributed to the biography and family material, with a note that the site had not yet obtained the original press images.
Evidence restored in the story gallery — a photograph carries an accession number, ownership and evidence level in the archive table, but in the immersive gallery only a caption survived. Each of the fourteen images now carries a line giving number, ownership and evidence level, with the number linking back to its row in the table.
The name of one dish corrected in several languages — the English archive table read “Home-Style Braised Sea Cucumber”, which turned the minced pork into a cooking method and was simply wrong; the German had split the word for sea cucumber into shark plus sea cucumber, and once rendered it as sea urchin; French and Spanish were off as well. Corrected consistently in four languages across 49 files.
Structured data raised to object level — the archive page’s JSON-LD covered nine hand-picked items; it now covers all 61, each with a stable anchor, carrier, ownership, evidence level, holding status and rights statement, aligned to CIDOC-CRM classes (E38 image, E31 document, E22 object) so institutional systems can harvest it.
Accessibility and typography — skip-to-content links, <main> landmarks, aria labels that follow the page language, and language tags on inline Chinese characters were added site-wide. The archive table becomes cards on phones, where nine columns had meant horizontal dragging and no real reading. English, French, German and Spanish get their own Latin font stack, and straight ASCII quotes were replaced with typographic ones throughout.
Japanese: a primary source’s title had a character changed — the biography’s title appeared repeatedly with the wrong final character. Since the site offers three citation formats, a Japanese researcher copying them would have generated a reference to a work that does not exist. All corrected.
Japanese: a unit of measure meant something else — photographs were listed as 6×8 “cun”. In Chinese usage that means inches; the Japanese character of the same shape is about 3.03 cm, so a Japanese reader would have taken 15.2×20.3 cm for 18.2×24.2 cm, about twenty per cent out. Now given in centimetres with inches in brackets.
Japanese: false friends and simplified characters — one word meant head nurse or head teacher in Japanese where a military commander was meant; another meant a stage performance where a cooking demonstration was meant; a dozen more Chinese words and twelve classes of simplified character had been left standing in Japanese prose. All corrected. Brown spots on paper had been called rust marks, the term for metal; they are now given the conservation term, foxing.
Japanese: readings and first-use glosses added — there was not a single reading gloss on the site, so a Japanese reader could not pronounce any name in the lineage. Nineteen personal names, place names, institution names and dish names now carry readings at first use, with pinyin added for Chen Songru and Chen Tinglong — Japanese readers remember by sound, researchers search by pinyin. Four terms with the highest comprehension cost also gained a first-use gloss.
Korean: the subject’s own name split in two — the same man appeared under one spelling eight hundred times and another three hundred. The first spliced a Sino-Korean reading onto the Chinese pronunciation, which does not follow the National Institute of Korean Language’s rules and does not connect to existing Korean scholarship on Chinese names. Standardised site-wide, with derived names corrected to match.
Korean: an institution demoted to a generic noun — the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant was rendered as “a Sichuan eatery” in more than two hundred places, erasing what the institution was. Restored to the proper name throughout.
Korean: the lineage and committee names were never translated — some seventy names on two pages stood in simplified Chinese, leaving a Korean reader unable to read any of them. Each is now transliterated from the Chinese pronunciation with the characters retained alongside.
Korean: Sino-Korean words that read as something else — one word reads first as “ambassador” where “master” was meant, in over four hundred places; another as “chairman” where “venue” was meant; another as “fine liquor” where “master chef” was meant; another as “trouble taken” where “manuscript” was meant. All replaced with words a Korean reader will not misread. One factual mistranslation was also fixed: adding water to the Premier’s glass had become “mixing”, at odds with the Chinese, Japanese and English.
Korean: citation templates and the home page — the Chinese national standard GB/T 7714 requires citation in the language of the original, but the Korean edition had translated both author and title, so a copied citation would find nothing in a Chinese database. Restored, with the reason given. The Korean home page still carried superseded copy; labels and descriptions for the two new exhibitions were brought into line with the Chinese, English and Japanese, and six missing exhibition sections were added.
English: factual mistranslations — a Beijing municipal people’s congress delegate card of 10 December 1981 had become a “Sichuan Restaurant Delegate ID”, erasing what the credential was; a renaming during the Cultural Revolution had become a “wartime renaming”, a word the Chinese does not contain; and Choe Yong-gon, chairman of the standing committee of the DPRK’s Supreme People’s Assembly, had become “Vice Premier”. All three corrected.
English: newspaper identities — reports from Lianhe Wanbao in 1987 had been split back into two mastheads that had ceased publication in 1983; Shin Min Daily News appeared under two misspellings, and one article was credited to the wrong paper entirely. All now use each paper’s official English masthead.
English: cataloguing vocabulary — the materials column held object types (paper photo, paper manuscript); it now follows international practice with material and technique (gelatin silver print, pen and ink on paper, twelve classes in all). “Family-owned” in the rights column carried a commercial-property flavour and conflated custody, provenance and reproduction rights; it now reads “Collection of the chef’s family”. The corresponding Japanese and Korean fields were corrected to match.
English: a dish name that contradicted the site’s own text — the cabbage dish had been translated as “steamed”, while the site’s own craft page describes hot clear broth being ladled over it; and the literal “boiling water” of the name misses the point, which is the clarified stock. It now keeps the original name with a functional gloss.
And one contradiction inside the Chinese itself — the byline on the article of 4 August 1987 appeared one way on the news page and another in the archive and the exhibition. The archive table was taken as authoritative and every edition brought into line.
Newspaper attribution corrected — the French and Spanish editions credited the 1987 report to Nanyang Siang Pau. That paper and Sin Chew Jit Poh merged and ceased publication on 16 March 1983, so a report from 1987 cannot have appeared in either. All three editions now give Lianhe Wanbao.
The qualifier in “one of the founders” — three home-page descriptions had compressed “one of the founders” into “pioneer”, turning one contributor among several into a singular position, while the body text elsewhere acknowledged the parallel work of his contemporaries. The qualifier is restored.
Choe Yong-gon’s office — the French and Spanish had made him president of the DPRK. His office was chairman of the standing committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly; the full title is now given.
A German cataloguing note that misstated the rule — the Chinese says the lineage page is ordered by stroke count of the surname; the German said alphabetically. This is precisely the page where the site uses its ordering rule to demonstrate neutrality, so an error in the note is an error in the cataloguing metadata. Corrected.
German and Spanish dish names — a braised beef-head dish became “grilled ox forehead”; pickled chillies became “chillies in vinegar”, when they are in fact lacto-fermented in brine; and a word in one Spanish cold-platter name was not a Spanish word at all. All corrected.
The cabbage dish against the site’s own account of the method — the settled French rendering said “steamed”, while the method described on the same page is repeated ladling of boiling clear broth, with no steaming involved; the German was too vague. All three now keep the original name with an explanatory gloss.
A German book title turned into praise — a neutral title had become “masterpiece of Sichuan cuisine”, an evaluative phrase, and it recurred with every citation. Restored to a neutral rendering.
French typographic rules — French requires a no-break space inside guillemets and before semicolons, question marks, exclamation marks and colons; the site had not one. On narrow screens a guillemet would break away from its word and a colon would end up alone at the start of a line. Some 2,800 were inserted to the Imprimerie nationale’s rules.
German quotation marks — quotations opened with the German low mark and closed with a straight one, leaving them unclosed. All closed to Duden. Also fixed: umlauts written in the ue/ae fallback form, missing hyphens in compounds, and Chinese enumeration commas and semicolons left inside German sentences.
Terminology unified — the site name had two or three forms within each of three languages (Spanish had two even in page titles), a book title had three pinyin spellings, and “founding head chef” had two renderings in every language. All standardised, along with two spellings of the French adjective for Sichuan and a mix of Chinese and English forms of Beijing in German and Spanish.
Accessibility — alt text on portraits and seal images gave only the Chinese name, in 212 places across six editions, so a screen reader would read Chinese aloud to a non-Chinese reader. Replaced with descriptive text in each language.
Endangered ingredients in a present-day context — bird’s nest, shark fin and bear paw had been described as marking the grade of a state banquet, which turns a historical record into praise for status when set in a display context. All eight editions now historicise the wording as evidence of how banquet hierarchy was then understood, with a new note: the site records these names as the manuscript has them, for the study of twentieth-century banquet culture, and does not encourage obtaining, eating or recreating protected wildlife ingredients. It also points to a countervailing thread the site itself records — Chen Songru imitating shark fin with pig brain and bird’s nest with sweet-potato starch, so that ordinary diners could have the experience.
Chinese-only pages marked as such — the teaching resources page and this changelog existed only in Chinese and were simply dropped from the navigation of other editions, so international visitors had no way of knowing they existed. Entries marked “Chinese only” were added to the navigation of 98 pages.
1991: What He Had to Say — what had been a bare player page became an approach to the year itself: an archival opening screen (a huge 1991, scan lines and grain, a VCR time code that follows playback, and a count of years the script works out for itself), six chapter entries, a timeline running through 1991 with him at its centre, and a then-and-now close. The title went through one intermediate form before settling.
The site’s first subtitle track — generated from the transcript checked by the family, film.zh.vtt with 75 cues. The header states that speaker labels in square brackets were added by the editor and are not in the audio. This is the first track among the site’s 48 videos; accessibility, full-text search and citation by position start here.
Time codes converted — narration and interview passages were marked with positions on the original tape, from 28:14, but the film on the page starts at 0:00, so clicking took the reader nowhere useful. All converted to positions within the film and made clickable; the tape positions are kept as archival information.
Three corrections to the transcript (the family checked the audio) — “deeply attached to the restaurant”, not “to Sichuan cooking”; “everyone says I am one of Master Chen’s favoured disciples”; and “there are too few of them — at seventy he is still giving off light and heat”. The interviewee at 34:16 is confirmed as Yang Jianmin, the restaurant’s general manager, where the note had said the speaker was unidentified.
1959 · appendix · the premises — the plan of the restaurant’s three courtyards was replaced with the original hand-drawn drawing, background and frame removed; the previous one had been a generated SVG. The caption was corrected against what the drawing actually labels: three small banquet rooms flanking the third courtyard, and an à la carte dining room on the east side of the second, where the caption had wrongly said private rooms.
The coda unified across four exhibitions — each page had been ending with a different set of links. All now use one form: the CODA wordmark, the three sister exhibitions, and an invitation to take part in the research — 26 files in all. The coda’s job is to send the reader to the other three exhibitions; the content pages are already reachable from the navigation.
Links in exhibition prose did not look like links — same colour as the text, no underline. The cookbook had linked to its catalogue entry all along, with no way for a reader to know. Now dark red with a hairline underline across all four exhibitions, and the section on the 1989 book gained a “cover and copyright page” entry.
Two fixes in the video upload workflow — the bucket region was set to Beijing when it is in fact Guangzhou, so every upload died on an SSL disconnect; once fixed, a 53 MB file then hit a thirty-minute timeout. Region corrected, timeout raised to 120 minutes, 5 MB parts and ten threads. The full 1991 film is now online.
A link nested inside a button — the second line of the chapter index contained a link to the cookbook, while the whole line was itself a button. Nesting an interactive element inside a button is invalid, and on a phone tapping the line fired the inner link and jumped to the craft page instead of seeking the player. The link inside the button became plain text; the book is still reachable from the body text and the timeline on the same page. The rest of the site was checked and has no other instance.
Subtitle size — set to 56 per cent of video height, down from 68, which was too large. Subtitle position was also confirmed to use line:80% proportional placement, so showing or hiding the player controls no longer shifts it; the black box behind the text was cleared.
HTML cache headers — the HTML carried no Cache-Control at all, so browsers guessed a lifetime from Last-Modified, often several hours; a change would show as the old version on a phone, or need a forced reload. Deployment gained a step that re-uploads only the HTML with no-cache, must-revalidate so readers revalidate each time. Images, video and CSS are untouched and still cache long. The step is set not to block deployment: if it fails, at worst the headers were not applied, and the content itself is already up.
Subtitles — size set to 80 per cent of video height, and the bracketed speaker labels removed: they were added by the editor rather than spoken, and who is speaking in each passage is already stated in the body text. Cue count went from 75 to 72.
Chapter entries on phones — the play control had been dropping to the bottom of each row, small and stranded. Now a two-column layout with text left and button right, the button a 42-pixel circle that reads unmistakably as play.
Plan drawing updated — replaced with a newer hand-drawn original, background removed along with the left, right and top borders. The labels were corrected: the first courtyard held the snack counter, the main hall of the second courtyard was the à la carte dining room, as was its east side — where three earlier captions had variously said “walk-in à la carte dining room”, “walk-in dining room” and “private rooms”, all wrong.
A “life” link pointed to the wrong page — in the 1991 exhibition it went to the lineage page instead of the life page. Fixed in the Chinese and English editions.
The “cover and copyright page” link showed neither — it jumped to the catalogue card on the craft page, but the cover and copyright page are collapsed inside that card, so a reader arrived at a closed card. The craft page now expands the matching card and scrolls to it when it detects the #book-xxx anchor.
Plan drawing border — the previous version had cropped the left, right and top borders; the drawing’s full border is restored, the background still transparent. The image carries a version number so browsers do not serve the old one.
The premises appendix completed in seven languages — the history of the mansion (from a prince’s residence through a banker’s house and ministry offices to a state-banquet restaurant), the hand-drawn plan of the three courtyards and two footnotes marking unresolved points existed only in Chinese; all seven other editions now have them, their footnotes rising from 10 to 12 to match the master.
Handling of proper names — names of the former residences keep their characters in every edition, with transliteration and a gloss rather than a translation of the sense; alt text on the plan is translated in each language with no Chinese left standing.
Plan drawing display size — the room names on the red plaques were unreadable at 640 pixels wide. The drawing is a raster image, so the text cannot be enlarged on its own; display width went from 640 to 960, making the labels half again as large. Applied in all eight editions.
Plan drawing — display width returned to 640 pixels, leaving the drawing as it was.
Exhibition renamed — retitled across all eight editions: link text, page titles, og and DC metadata and JSON-LD in 36 files. The opening line had duplicated the new title and was rewritten to describe the tape going into a cupboard after filming and staying there for decades, with the number of years still worked out by script from the current date.
UNIT 02 — with the retitling, the phrase became free again and the unit reverted from “his own voice” to it.
Plan drawing — replaced with the version whose plaque labels are enlarged, in all eight editions, with size and cache version updated. Background removal and border retention follow the previous settings.
Unit numbering — after the full-narration section was dropped, numbering jumped from unit 02 to unit 04, leaving a hole. Renumbered 02, 03, 04, with anchors and in-page references brought into line.
Opening line — brought into line with the exhibition title. The number of years is still computed by script rather than hard-coded.
Title settled — the earlier title is restored in all eight editions. The opening line about the tape sitting in a cupboard stays as it is; it now works as an opening rather than as the title.
Traditional Chinese edition — profile1991-zh-tw.html is live, with body text, footnotes, chapter entries, timeline and closing all corresponding to the master. Internal links point to traditional-Chinese pages; where none exists yet, they fall back to the Chinese page rather than leaving a dead link.
The language switcher led to the wrong exhibition — the whole menu in the Chinese and English editions pointed at the Singapore exhibition, left over from copying a template, so switching language on this page took the reader to a different exhibition. Now pointing at this page’s own editions.
Plan drawing — replaced with the latest hand-drawn original in all eight editions, with size and cache version updated.
Page names made consistent — the exhibition called one page “life” when the navigation calls it “Life and Era”, and another “craft” when the navigation calls it “Craft and Dishes”, so a reader looking for them found nothing. All three editions now use the formal names from the navigation.
The honest-limits reference made clickable — the text cited the honest-limits section but the words were plain text with nowhere to go. Now linked to that section on the About page, in three editions.
A link to “contradiction five” landed in the wrong place — it pointed only at the top of the Wisdom page, leaving the reader to hunt; and the text wrote the heading differently from the site’s own form. An anchor was added to that heading in all eight editions and the text now links straight to it, with the wording made consistent.
Two link styles on one page — the visible link style covered only links inside p and li , while the timeline and chapter notes sit in span , so references like the one to the Wisdom page stayed the same colour as the text and gave no sign of being clickable. The style now applies to the whole unit, across all four exhibitions.
Subtitle segmentation — where a cue held two clauses separated by a comma, it is now two cues; all punctuation is dropped, with enumeration commas becoming spaces so the rhythm of a list survives. Cue count rose from 72 to 87, each one a single unit of speech. The header note records the treatment.
The black box behind subtitles — in Chrome and Edge the box is not painted by ::cue but is the background of the -webkit-media-text-track-display layer, which ::cue cannot override. That layer’s background is now cleared separately, in three editions.
Subtitle size — reduced from 80 per cent of video height to 64.
Subtitle size — kept at 80 per cent of video height; the previous change to 64 is withdrawn.
Subtitles on phones — the size is relative to video height, and on a phone the video is only about 257 pixels tall, so 80 per cent came out around 10 pixels, too small to read. Below 640 pixels it is raised to 100 per cent, about 13 pixels; on desktop it stays at 80.
The black box behind subtitles, solved — it could not be cleared on desktop because subtitle styling in Chrome and Edge is governed by browser and operating-system caption preferences, which outrank page CSS: whatever ::cue says can be overridden. The browser no longer renders them: the track is hidden and the page draws the text over the video itself, so size, position and shadow are fully under control.
Deployment: cache headers applied to only half the files — the step that applies no-cache to HTML had been re-uploading all two hundred-odd files each time and was measured hitting a 300-second timeout, which meant the later files never received the header at all; because the step is set not to block deployment, the problem was easy to miss. It now re-uploads only the HTML changed in that run, usually a handful of files.

6 August 2026

Watermarks made uniform; claim-level footnotes go live site-wide; navigation and language switcher fixed on the recipe pages

The watermark was standardised across 22 images in the certificates and clippings folders (44 files including thumbnails) to one specification — Noto Serif SC, #96505A, 55 per cent opacity, tiled horizontally — and one image carrying two overlaid watermarks was fixed. The manuscript and book images were left for later, having no clean originals to work from.
Added: claim-level footnotes — about 97 notes across 19 pages, each factual assertion traceable by click to its source (memoir, oral-history manuscript, biography chapter, independent source), colour-coded by evidence level. The teaching page, the news page and this changelog were judged not to need them, being teaching material about the site, a list of links that already carry their sources, and the site’s own version record.
The sixteen recipe pages were brought onto the site’s current grouped navigation, gaining entries for the 1959, manuscript and Singapore exhibitions, and given a language switcher, which they had entirely lacked.
A site-wide Codex review found that on all 112 non-Chinese recipe pages the language menu pointed at the home page in that language rather than at the dish’s own translation, and that the grouped navigation lacked its styles so the menus unfolded out of place — all fixed, along with a missing current-language highlight on the home page and a wrong label on the language button of two traditional-Chinese exhibition pages.

5 August 2026

The manuscript exhibition adopts a static IIIF approach — 41 scans in all (the 37 manuscript pages, the cover and three additional drafts) with a manifest conforming to IIIF Presentation API 3.0 (manifest.json), and the OpenSeadragon deep-zoom viewer extended to every image and certificate gallery on the site, across 224 pages.
Added: A drag-and-zoom minimap on the timeline (Life and Era page) and hover labels identifying people in photographs (the group of eight at Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage, in the 1959 exhibition, in eight languages).
Corrections: MS-005 and MS-006 were transposed in the archive listing, and the entry for MS-006, the complete manuscript, was missing altogether from all seven non-Chinese editions. Both fixed.
Added: A collection registry（collection-registry.csv), exporting structured data for all 61 catalogued items so researchers can check them in bulk. Building it turned up 40 image captions across 12 files where an unescaped quotation mark had truncated the HTML attribute; those were fixed too.
Added: A checksum list（fixity-manifest.csv) — SHA-256 checksums for all 220 original image and video files, so a researcher can verify that a download is intact and unaltered. The About page gained a note on format choices and migration principles.
Added: A teaching resources page (education.html) — a six-stop curator’s tour, a lesson plan and three student worksheets for museum-studies and history undergraduates, using this site’s own curatorial decisions as the cases.
Correction: in the 1959 exhibition, one unit showed the Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage group photograph under a caption describing the farewell gathering. Replaced throughout with PH-008, the farewell gathering at Shengdeng Temple in all eight editions. The Du Fu photograph, its hover labels and the associated call for identifications came off that page, and the third stop of the curator’s tour switched to a “sought” entry in the archive (CE-004).

4 August 2026

Fixed a mobile navigation menu that was clipped on some devices, hiding the Community link.
The Singapore exhibition gained a note on the historical background of the Taiwanese guest’s toast — a glimpse of business contact across the strait before family visits were permitted — in seven languages.
The About page gained a note on long-term preservation and web archiving (Internet Archive snapshots). Every point at which the site asks for help — corrections, unidentified people, donations of material — now routes to info@chensongru.com, an address the site actually receives, in all eight editions.

3 August 2026

Two exhibitions go live in full, all eight editions completed the same day

Two new online exhibitions: 37 Pages: The History of Sichuan Cuisine in His Own Hand (the digitised manuscript) and 21 Days in Singapore: The 1987 Footage (route map, itinerary, venue photographs, clippings and the original footage). All seven translations were completed the same day.
The Singapore exhibition was expanded with a route map on a true outline of China (Albers equal-area conic, to the national standard parameters), an itinerary timeline, and the placing of the “national treasure” epithet.
The 1959 exhibition was rebuilt as a chronological timeline — from the start of the year in Chengdu through selection and farewell, arrival and preparation, the trial dinner, the opening, the first visit to Zhongnanhai and Beidaihe — with two further original photographs added.
Watermarks were applied to the covers and copyright pages of the two books, and the manuscript watermark changed to full-page tiling for legibility.

2 August 2026

The 1959 exhibition launches; the lineage is substantially expanded; the French, German and Spanish revisions conclude

New online exhibition: 1959: Sichuan Cuisine Comes to Beijing, live in all eight languages the same day.
New facts distilled from five WeChat articles were added (the people’s congress credential, a leg ailment, disagreements over dish names among them), and the news page gained further source links, reordered by year.
Added to the life page: disagreements over the year he joined the Party and the year of his first-grade certification, the Jiamusi branch, the Jinshuiyuan episode, and the family’s decision that his ashes remain in Beijing.
Several disciples were added to the lineage, some with independent sources raising their evidence level, and the corresponding certificates and photographs added to the archive.
The Community page gained a submitted essay: “Baiwei Songru: A Life to Look Up To”, by Langtaosha.
The seven-day site-wide revision of the French, German and Spanish editions concluded, with fixes applied from an independent Codex spot-check.

31 July – 1 August 2026

The About page gained a note explaining that titles such as “master” are used as historical narrative, in response to new 2026 rules on awards by social organisations.
Missing or damaged content was restored across many pages in Japanese, Korean, French, German and Spanish — about, committee, life, craft, news and archive, plus the sixteen recipe pages — and some language files were rebuilt.
Fixed a .gitignore rule that had long excluded craft-lessons/ an entire directory: the French, German and Spanish recipe pages had therefore never actually been deployed, and the rule had also concealed file corruption.
A site-wide spot-check fixed structural problems including transposed footer link labels and missing closing tags.

30 July 2026

Source links were added for historical and lineage material, and two new entries added to the life timeline and synchronised to the traditional-Chinese and English editions.
The archive, news and committee pages in traditional Chinese and English were brought fully into line with the Chinese, and the story gallery gained both editions.

29 July 2026

An immersive story gallery was added, and the lineage gained a visual tree, later extended to six languages.
The archive gained a certificate gallery of 21 scans and a photograph section on 1959, and JSON-LD was extended to the core pages in all eight languages.
The dates on certificates CE-005 and CE-006 were corrected against close-up photographs.
The site search index was completed for all eight languages, and accessibility attributes added to images.

26–28 July 2026

The traditional-Chinese edition goes live; navigation and information architecture rebuilt

A full traditional-Chinese translation was added, and the language menu fixed to a standing order.
The full PDF of the biography was removed from the repository over copyright risk; the craft page now shows only the cover and copyright page.
The lineage tree was added and refined over several rounds — inclusion of disciples, independent corroboration, styling — and a role-play question-and-answer section was added to the Wisdom page with an explicit statement that it is inference.
A holdings page was added, later renamed the Digital Archive, and the life page gained an interactive timeline and a map of his movements.
Navigation, search box and language switcher settled after several rounds of repositioning, and structural styling damage was repaired on 10 core pages and 70 language variants.

23–25 July 2026

The site goes live

First release of the Baiwei Songru memorial site, deployed to Tencent Cloud COS and CDN, with the required Chinese ICP and public-security filings completed.
Watermarks were applied to certificates, photographs and clippings, with right-click and drag saving disabled; the date of birth follows the 1993 official obituary, 7 December 1921.
A team section was added, later folded into the About page; entries for Chu Tugen, Yang Jianmin and others were added to the lineage; and the four-level evidence labelling used throughout the site was established.

The honest limits of this log

This page was compiled by hand from the commit history. The early period, from 23 July to 1 August 2026, iterated fast, and not every change left a separately quotable note behind, so these summaries necessarily select. To verify the exact wording and timestamp of any particular change, consult the GitHub commit history or the Internet Archive snapshots linked above: those are the authoritative record. The page will continue to be added to as substantial updates are made, and still omits purely cosmetic and deployment work.