Some personal websites grow until they stop looking like homepages and start looking like somebody quietly built a research library in public.
Silkqin is John Thompson’s long-running site devoted to the guqin, the ancient Chinese seven-string zither. The domain dates to the early 2000s, but the material represents decades of performance, translation, historical research, reconstruction, and collecting.
The site is enormous in the old-Web sense of the word.
There are sections on historical handbooks, instruments as physical objects, paintings, poetry, songs, tunings, performance practice, ideology, biographies, recordings, and the process of reconstructing music from old tablature. Navigation is dense because the subject is dense.
One particularly important theme is right in the site’s name: silk strings.
Modern guqin players often use metal-nylon strings, but Thompson has spent years documenting and advocating historically informed performance with traditional silk strings. His pages discuss how the material changes the sound and playing technique, along with the historical shift away from silk during the twentieth century.
The Web as a working notebook
Silkqin is not arranged like a museum exhibit designed to give a visitor five facts and send them onward.
It behaves like a scholar-performer’s working archive.
A page may contain historical quotations, Chinese text, translation notes, tuning details, links to related essays, audio, references to old qin handbooks, and corrections accumulated over time. Other pages provide recordings and reconstructed performances of pieces whose notation survives from centuries ago.
That makes the site particularly suited to the Web as it originally worked: many small documents joined by links, allowed to grow independently, with the reader free to disappear down whichever path becomes interesting.
It is also a reminder that the early independent Web was global in a way that gets lost when Internet history is reduced to American browser companies and dot-com startups.
A personal domain could become a publishing platform for extremely specialized cultural knowledge that would otherwise be scattered across books, manuscripts, recordings, personal correspondence, and classrooms.
Silkqin is still being used and cited by musicians and researchers. That longevity is part of its value. The site is not merely preserved; it remains useful.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes sites like this because the most valuable old pages are often the ones built by somebody who cared far more about the subject than about whether the site looked modern.
Twenty-three years of domain age is impressive.
A musical tradition measured in millennia is less easily impressed.