Loading the globe
The history of a city, lit one era at a time.
Each film builds one city as a white architectural model and lights it era by era, from its first settlers to today. Every fact on screen has a source.
Drag to turn the globe.
The earth as a white model63,253 plaster blocks, raised where the ground is high and where many people live. A column of light is a city with a film.
The collection
Each film is one city's whole history. The bar under it is the film itself: its chapters, in the colours they have on screen.
From a city to a film
A coding agent does the work in three passes; a person directs it and checks every step in the browser.
Han Chang’an, 91 BCE: a schematic city drawn from excavation reports. Research
A timeline of the city, each fact with its source and the original words, before anything is drawn.
Qin Xianyang, 350 BCE: Palace No. 6 on its terrace. Model
Today's buildings from open data, and each earlier city generated from the archaeology, all in white.
206 BCE: Xiang Yu burns the palaces of Qin. Light
Era by era the model takes the colours of its time, with narration, music and the city as it is now.
Make your city's film
You need Claude Code, a computer with a graphics card, and a city you want to understand.
Make it
Install the project as a Claude Code skill and name a city and the era to start from. You review every step in the browser.
Publish it
Put the film on YouTube, Bilibili or any video site. To let people play it here as well, publish its web bundle on a Hugging Face dataset or your own GitHub Pages.
Add it here
Open a pull request with your city's folder and its entry.json. We check the sources, the licences and the film.
Read the submitting guide