A keeper of figures. 关于

SITU (司图) means the keeper of figures — an old phrase borrowed for a new purpose. The project is a virtual museum of the historical Silk Roads, covering ninety-eight UNESCO heritage sites from Marrakesh and Cordoba in the west, across Persia and Central Asia, through the Tarim Basin and the Hexi corridor, into the Tang capitals, and out to Quanzhou and Heijō-kyō.

It is built by a small studio of architects and heritage researchers who spent years feeling that no single tool let them read, map and visualise a place at the same time. Wikipedia is shallow. GIS is opaque. Museum websites are static. SITU is the answer we wished existed.

Everything here — workspace, knowledge graph, atlas, conversation — is open and free for individual researchers, students, and the merely curious. Heritage scholarship should not live behind a paywall, and a fifteen-year-old should be able to use the same tools as a tenured professor.

We work out of Wuhan, with collaborators across architecture, archaeology, and computational humanities. The platform is deliberately small and slow — we'd rather ship one careful feature a month than ten loud ones a week. If that sounds like your kind of thing, come find us.