Kongming’s Archives

All old-section biographies have been migrated over to the new biographies page. This has been a bear of a task—even after having written a one-off program to help—and it feels good to “finish” after months of chipping away.

I say “finished” because there is still work to do—portraits, details on comprehensive biographies, redirection of old links, reorganizing navigation, and adding search—but this is a more enjoyable task.

ZL181 has published many new Sanguozhi translations.

The encyclopedia will display links to new biographies as caches expire. A new biographies widget has been added to the home page. Also, the new encyclopedia entries widget has been repaired, and no longer shares “stub” (nearly empty) entries.

Much work has been underway behind the scenes. Aside from transitioning old content to the new layout, the main focus has been on publishing some new content from the the development project.

At long last, a new Three Kingdoms Biographies section has launched. It features two new Sanguozhi biographies from ZL181—Cao Xiong and Lü Qian (Zike)—with more to come. Existing biographies, still featured at the old biographies page, will be moved to the new biographies page and layout. Reach out if you are interested in participating. Authors can now add, edit, and control publishing of their own biographies.

Progress has been made with the new online community translation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel, which can also be community edited. Reach out if you would like to participate. Chapters 1-5 have gone through a first draft, and chapters 6–26 are published in rough draft.

Speaking of online novels, threekingdoms.com is online again, and have been for a while. Our project was launched after they were offline for an extended period of time.

New pages have been launched for Destiny of an Emperor officers and Romance of the Three Kingdoms VIII officers. More work to come on this front. Behind these projects is a broader effort to gradually release new encyclopedia-like features, including, in time, a new Three Kingdoms Officer Encyclopedia.

Maps of the Three Kingdoms has been updated with remastered maps from Zhou Dadudu, including both province province and China maps. Cache may need to be refreshed if you visited recently. The interactive map now includes shoreline changes and loads much faster.

I have changed my approach to restoring content. Before I was updating the website as a whole, with transitional code, which called for changes to be made across the whole website before updates were published. While in theory this could have been more efficient, it added a layer of complexity to the legacy code, and didn’t feel rewarding to work on as little was published. Now I will update sections one at a time, removing legacy code as I go and publishing each when finished. This already feels more encouraging, and allows updates to be shared sooner. Thankfully work already done can be carried forward.

Today’s update featured some of the older Romance of the Three Kingdoms pages, and new code for game pages, which should make it much easier to revise the remaining sections.

A big update (but small content-wise) featuring pretty extensive code revisions and improvements. A lot of effort, here, to deal with bots, handle email communication well, and support future user interaction forms. A behind-the-scenes transition of our website to the new theme continues.

2023 may have been a quiet year from the perspective of the Kongming’s Archives home page, but a massive amount of work has gone into the website and future content. The Development Project, behind the Three Kingdoms Encyclopedia, has been rewritten and is being expanded into new topics like locations, ranks and titles, reign years. A new Romance of the Three Kingdoms online novel has been in the works (RIP threekingdoms.com) and some chapters are already available on our website. Want to participate? Scholars of Shen Zhou and Simulated RTK have been restored to transitional themes. Heaps of content on Kongming’s Archives has been repaired or restored and the website is undergoing a transition to use a new theme with new code.

Most of these improvements have been architectural: laying the groundwork for site restoration and content yet to come. Thankfully, for many of these things, we are reaching a point where Kongming’s Archives can be updated again, so 2024 ought to look busier from the perspective of public-facing content.

Want to support the effort? Please back us on Patreon.

Simulated RTK has finally been re-designed. Have feedback? And Big Map (if you know, you know) has been restored! A new game is also being explored. If you are interested, head over and chime in.

With great thanks to Zhou Dadudu, we introduce the new Maps of the Three Kingdoms page. It features Zhou Dadudu’s lovely China and province maps and the long-familiar map by William L, along with an interactive China map which you can use to view the provinces.

Scholars of Shen Zhou has finally been re-designed. Have feedback?

Due to problems associated with the Fandom platform, including aggressive advertising, the Koei Tecmo Wiki has moved to a new address. Please use their new address to support them in this move.

Launched by long-time community members, friends of the website, and folks-simply-knowledgeable about the Three Kingdoms, enjoy this new podcast.

Thank you, everyone, for your kind words and support. As requested, and with sincere appreciation as a means to help in supporting this website and its maintenance, we have launched a Patreon.. Please support us if you have some coin to spare.

A few years we went offline. Our websites use old code which broke as hosts dropped support for security reasons (PHP 6). I was able to restore our sites for a short time, but a much larger code rewriting project was necessary. Due time demands of this project, in combination with simple ol’ fashioned struggling mental health, we remained offline for a few years. I have long regretted this fate, and this update kickstarts an earnest effort to not just patch but restore Kongming’s Archives, Scholars of Shen Zhou, and Simulated RTK.