Chang Clan General Association: 88 Years in Geylang

What it is

A demo build, not a client project. I made this to show what the workshop stack can do when it’s pointed at a real institution with real archives, not a placeholder landing page.

The Singapore Chang Clan General Association has been gathering 張 surname families in Geylang since 1937. The new site moves an 88-year-old institution online with a single editorial structure: heritage chapters, sub-clan stories, events, and membership, all bilingual in English and Chinese.

Why I built it

Most clan association sites in Singapore are stuck on legacy CMS layouts that bury the story under nested menus. The Chang Clan deserved better. Eighty-eight years of history, twelve sub-clans, and a building that survived the war years should not feel like a council notice board. The new site treats the association like the cultural institution it is: archival photography, museum-style specs, and a reading flow that respects the material.

How it was built

The site was built with Claude Code and Astro, the same stack I use across CheckHowMuch.sg and SeeWhatIf.com. Bilingual routing is handled at the page level, with parallel English and Chinese pages sharing the same component layouts. Content was structured from existing source material into chapter-style sections, with archival photography given full-bleed treatment and Chinese typography styled for proper character spacing.

The site runs on Cloudflare Pages with zero hosting costs. Membership and contact flows are wired up, sub-clan pages are scaffolded for the committee to fill in over time, and the design is built to age well rather than chase a trend.

I wrote about the rebuild process in detail at /blog/chang-clan-rebuild/, including the four-step workflow for preserving heritage content during a Claude Code rebuild.