# Drag once and you see the Qin unify the six states: a Google engineer's historical map, 4000 stars in two weeks · GitHub open source project

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> A topic where one drag gives you a picture and ordinary people have feelings got reposted in two rounds by Chinese resource accounts on X and Weibo. Each time it hit GitHub Trending, and the content was deep enough that people who came in were willing to star it.

[GitHub open-source project](https://stringers.io/en/github/index.md) · written 11-6

DeanChensj/jiangshan-map · DeanChensj

# Drag once and you see the Qin unify the six states: a Google engineer's historical map, 4000 stars in two weeks

**What it is** A free, open-source web page: drag a timeline to watch China's territory change over two thousand years, click a city to see its names past and present, click a historical figure to trace the route of their life.

**Why it took off** It shows something visual the moment you touch it, and its subject has emotional pull for ordinary people. Chinese X and Weibo resource accounts reposted it twice, and each time it hit GitHub Trending. The content was deep enough that people who arrived through a repost were willing to star it.

**A** **How you could follow it** Stop making China history maps. Pick another knowledge subject with similar mass appeal (a single era, a poet's journeys, Japanese or Korean peninsula history, canal and railway changes), build it as a web page that changes as you click and drag, go deep on the content, and hand it straight to the resource accounts.

Grade A: the recipe is clear, one person can build it in two or three weeks, and few people know about it yet. But whether it gets traction depends on whether a big account is willing to repost it. Same-topic projects that never got reposted stalled at one or two stars. What insiders are saying

Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-07-23 · 4,554 stars · 7 days +2,497

GitHub · stars

Data 2026-10-21 → 2026-11-08 (19 days, 13 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one

A programmer with only one public repo used AI to build, in two and a half weeks, an interactive map of China's dynasties that you scrub through on a timeline. Posts on Xiaohongshu got rate-limited, and pitches to a recommendation newsletter went nowhere. Then a resource account with 210k followers on X reposted it. Below: what it does well, where the stars actually came from, why similar projects only got one or two, and how to build one that can also collect stars.

### More than a hundred new stars overnight

One morning in Oct 2026 21, Dean Chen (DeanChensj on GitHub), an engineer at Google, woke up, checked GitHub, and found his "Jiangshan Shixu" had gained over a hundred stars overnight. A few days earlier it had only a few dozen. He later wrote on his blog: "Over the next few days the count kept climbing to 1400. Even now it still feels a bit unreal."

By Nov 6, the repo had 4346 stars and 500 forks. The repo was created in July, but all the real growth happened in the last two and a half weeks.

You understand what it is as soon as you open the page: a timeline at the bottom that you drag from 403 BCE to today, with China's map changing along with it. The Qin unify the six states, the Han and Tang golden ages, the Sixteen Prefectures of Yan-Yun being lost, the Yuan territory spreading across Asia, the Qing "Autumn Begonia" shape. Click Chang'an and see the names it has carried over two thousand years. Click Su Shi and see his route through repeated exiles to Huangzhou, Huizhou and Danzhou. It's free, needs no sign-up, and is open source under GPL-3.0.

### Two waves, and each was spread by others

GitHub star count (11-06):

| Date | Cumulative stars | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Before October | dozens | The author posted it to his own circle and asked colleagues to star it |
| 10-21 | 111 | Reposted by the "knowledge sharing officer" @knowledgefxg on X |
| 10-22 | +627 that day (Trendshift) | Hit GitHub Trending: #19 across all languages, #1 for HTML |
| 10-28 | 1614 | Sspai ran the author's creation story, Tencent News reprinted it, +70~140 per day |
| 10-31 | 1859 | X resource account "Weekly Resources" posted: "already 1.9K Stars" |
| 11-01 / 11-02 | +676 / +774 that day (Trendshift) | Weibo resource account reposted with the same copy, back on Trending, #3 for JavaScript |
| 11-06 | 4346 | Settled back to +120~250 per day |

The author had already done everything he could during cold start, and almost none of it made a splash. In his own words (blog, 10-25): the English version on LinkedIn "made no splash", while Reddit responded fairly well; "Back on Chinese platforms I hit a wall almost every time: posting on Xiaohongshu and Zhihu myself both got rate-limited". From Oct 17 to 21, he pitched Ruan Yifeng's Tech Enthusiast Weekly, GitHubDaily and the Xiaozhong Software forum in turn, "and nothing much happened".

The turning point was one repost: "Not until the 'knowledge sharing officer' on X reposted my site did Jiangshan Shixu first truly reach the public, gaining over a thousand stars within a few days." That account has 212k followers and focuses on AI programming, software and resource sites.

The second wave is more interesting. On Oct 31, the X account "Weekly Resources" posted: "Holy cow! Someone turned two thousand years of Chinese history into a draggable dynamic map... already 1.9K Stars". The next day, Weibo's "AIGC·Non-famous Programmer" and the AI blogger Zhang Daiyue reposted almost identical copy ("learning history used to mean memorizing"), and that Weibo repost got 392 reposts. This is classic Chinese resource-account cross-posting: **the stars gathered in the previous wave became the endorsement in the next wave's repost copy** , pushing it onto Trending once more.

In the blog the author also wrote a telling line: "My own Xiaohongshu posts got rate-limited, but after it took off, many people reposted my map on Xiaohongshu and WeChat Official Accounts, and they ended up getting a lot of traffic."

Nothing in the process suggests paid promotion, and Hacker News has no discussion of it.

### The idea isn't new, so why this one

A draggable timeline of historical territory maps isn't new. allhistory.com (全历史) built a "space-time map" back in 2018, covering the whole world, and its app (now called 全知识) has over 60k ratings in the China store on iOS. Chen Yong's 历史地图 on the App Store charted in 2017 and has nearly 10K ratings. The English-speaking world has GeaCron and OpenHistoricalMap.

Even more sobering are the same-topic open-source projects. On GitHub, "China historical map" repos created after September 2026 have only 1–2 stars each (11-06): China-Historical-Time-Space-Map (created 9-24, 2 stars), china-historical-maps, chinese-history-map... There is also a same-topic project called "Shanhe Ji" that pitched Ruan Yifeng's weekly too, 10-24. Same subject, but the results differ by three orders of magnitude.

The difference comes down to two things.

**First, it holds up on first and second look.** The first look is a visual hook: no install, no sign-up, it moves the moment you drag, the repost copy needs just one sentence, and a screen recording is ready-made material. The second look is content depth: 164 territory snapshots, "trace the origin of a place" for 18 dynasties, the travels of 104 historical figures, and it can locate a place from a line of poetry (ask about "Snow piles on Lantian pass, the horse won't advance" and it pins Han Yu's demotion and his stand at Lantian pass in 819 AD), and it can overlay modern provincial borders and a xuan paper ink-wash style. Commenters said things like "finally I don't need to search for what this place is called now while reading history" and "this level of detail, the person cleaning the data must have lost a lot of hair." The author himself said that the Shangjing of the Liao was drawn outside Liao territory, and that the Mongol Empire mysteriously had a hole punched in it at Lop Nur; he patched these bit by bit against the Zizhi Tongjian and the official histories. The resource accounts reposted the first look; the stars came from the second.

**Second, the subject itself has broad emotional appeal, not just developer interest.** Nostalgia for textbook maps, checking which circuit your hometown belonged to in the Tang, parents using it to teach their kids history. On Reddit an overseas Chinese user said they used it to teach their child Chinese history, and a GitHub reply said only: "My son has been hooked on this site for days." That carried it out of programmer circles and into mass resource accounts, whose readers were happy to tap a star on the way.

There's one more boost: "a non-CS student built it with AI in two and a half weeks, over two hundred commits" is a good story in itself. Several of the accounts that reposted it cover AI and tools, and Sspai was willing to run the piece.

Same-topic projects didn't take off not entirely because they were worse. hanzu.de, which has only 14 key years, is a shallow "diagram", but projects like Shanhe Ji never caught a big account's attention, so nothing followed. **Content depth is what keeps people once they arrive by repost; the repost is the direct cause of the traction.**

### Others are already following

- Geeprox/jiangshan-map: after forking, extended into a world history map (from 3400 years to 2024), with only 11-06 stars, 3.

- lz1219/jiangshan-xingzhi: created 10-31, adds an annotation layer to the map.

- The Lazycat MicroServer community packaged it as an app; the author's colleagues have built hometown history maps and used it to memorize Tang poetry.

These derivatives barely got any stars, which suggests the route of "tweak Jiangshan Shixu" doesn't work: resource accounts won't repost the same map a second time.

### If it were you

**A. You can follow it, but follow the recipe, not this map.** The slot for China's dynastic territories is already taken, and building another one would only read as copying. What's worth doing is picking a different knowledge subject with similar mass appeal and using the same playbook: visual on the first touch, deep content, and getting resource accounts to share it. The biggest bet is whether a big account is willing to repost you.

**Who it suits** : someone who can do it alone, who can write front end code and work with AI on the data, and who genuinely likes the subject (the author read textbook maps as a kid and was still filling in Shangjing's borders past midnight; without enthusiasm for the data half, you won't last). Ideally you have a solid block of two or three weeks of evenings and weekends.

**Who it doesn't suit** : anyone who wants to make money from it (it doesn't make money and doesn't plan to); anyone who just wants to reskin another China history map; anyone who has no interest in the subject and expects a finished product from one AI prompt (the author's first version did come from a single prompt, just a few crude color blocks; the real work was the next two hundred commits).

**How to do it** : pick the topic against three criteria: ordinary people have an emotional stake (nostalgia, hometowns, kids), it can be made into a picture that changes when you drag or click, and there is open data to dig into. Candidates: a single era like the Three Kingdoms or Spring and Autumn/Warring States, year by year; a complete collection of where each Tang and Song poet traveled; a century of change in China's railways or canals; Japanese or Korean peninsula territory across dynasties (for Japanese and Korean readers); or a slice of world history that people care about, like the Silk Road. Build it as a pure web page with no sign-up; give every state a deep link that can be shared (the author's link opens "Chang'an in 741 AD" directly); put a GIF in the README and bilingual instructions so resource accounts can run with it right away.

**How to get stars** : post it yourself, pitch newsletters and ask friends for stars, all of which are worth doing, but don't count on them. The author did all of them and almost nothing happened. What you really need to do is put the work directly in front of the Chinese resource accounts: accounts like the "knowledge sharing officer" and "Weekly Resources" on X, and AI and tools bloggers on Weibo. Send a DM with a screen recording of the demo. Once you've been reposted and gathered a thousand or two thousand stars, the second wave often comes from other resource accounts that pick it up on their own with the star count as proof. For the English version, post to interest subreddits like r/MapPorn or r/ChineseHistory; it responded better than LinkedIn.

**Timing** : there's no hard window, and the subject won't expire. But the novelty of the "built X with AI in two weeks" story is fading with resource accounts, so the sooner the better. Attention from parents and students tends to be higher before and after summer and winter holidays and around the start of the school year (inference).

**Signs you've misjudged it** : (1) Over the next one or two months, two or three similar "draggable history or knowledge maps" get picked up by resource accounts and each reach a thousand-plus stars. That would mean the lane is crowded and resource accounts are getting tired of it. (2) Your project reaches the content depth of Jiangshan Shixu and you pitch it to several resource accounts, but nobody reposts it within a month. That would mean it caught a one-time stroke of luck, not a repeatable recipe. (3) Conversely, if a world-history version like Geeprox's or a Japanese history version gets picked up by a big account, that means transplanting the subject to other regions works, and you should move on it quickly.

### Data and sources

- Stars and forks: GitHub, day by day from 10-21 to 11-06; daily increments and Trending rank come from Trendshift.

- The author's story and quotes: the author's blog post "From a history textbook illustration to 1k GitHub stars" (10-25), the same article on Sspai (10-27), a Tencent News reprint (10-29).

- Reposts: X @knowledgefxg (the repost date is inferred from the author's account and the timing of the star jump to be 10-20/21; exact engagement numbers not retrieved), X @grgerwcwetwet (10-31), Weibo "AIGC·Non-famous Programmer" (11-01, 392 reposts).

- Star counts of same-topic projects: GitHub search, 11-06.

- Competitor ratings: App Store China storefront.

- Website traffic is unknown; stars only mean people followed it, not that many people use it.

[GitHub repo ↗](https://github.com/DeanChensj/jiangshan-map)

**Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report**

Competitors

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from this one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AllHistory spatiotemporal map (allhistory.com, App now called 全知识) | Web | 2018(App) | iOS China store 全知识 61959 rating | Commercial, global, requires an App download; Jiangshan Timeline covers only China but in finer detail, with a rice-paper aesthetic, free and open source, no sign-up, and poetry plus figures' life paths |
| Tan Qixiang's 《中国历史地图集》 digital edition / historiamap.com | Web | Print 1980s; website not verified | Academic authority | Static volumes, no continuous dragging; historiamap covers only a few dynasties |
| CHGIS China Historical Geographic Information System | Other | 2000s | Academic dataset | It's data, not a consumer product |
| GeaCron / OpenHistoricalMap | Web | Years ago | International | Global, in English, China coverage is coarse, no place-name history or poetry |
| history.hanzu.de China historical map · view territory by year | Web | Not verified | Unknown | Only 14 key years, self-described as a schematic, much shallower |
| History Maps (Chen Yong) / Cool World History | iOS | 2017 / 2022 | iOS China store 9863 / 5431 ratings | Old-school tool app, dated UI, no click-to-trace cities or figure life paths |
| 山河纪 (zhaoguhong), China-Historical-Time-Space-Map | Open source | 2026-09/10 | Single-digit stars | Nearly the same topic, but less polished and never boosted by a big account |

Where users come from

- **Verified** **Reshared by a major Chinese resource account on X (知识分享官 @knowledgefxg, 212k followers)** : the author's blog says "it wasn't until the 知识分享官 on X reshared it… within a few days it got over a thousand stars"; matches the 10-21–23 jump

- **Verified** **X / Weibo reposts (Zhoulan resource account, AIGC · Not Famous Programmer, Zhang Dayue)** : 10-31 The Zhoulan post says "gained 1.9K Stars"; 11-01 the same copy reposted on Weibo 392; corresponding 11-01/02 +676/+774

- **Verified** **GitHub Trending** : Trendshift: 10-22 all languages #19, HTML #1; 11-01/02 all languages #20/#21, JS #3

- **Verified** **Author-written story articles (blog, sspai, Tencent News reprint)** : sspai.com/post/117510 (10-27), news.qq.com 10-29 reprint

- **Verified** **Reddit (r/MapPorn, r/ChineseHistory) English posts** : author says it got good reception; the posts exist, scores not retrieved

- **Verified** **Chinese recommendation communities (阮一峰's weekly, GitHubDaily, 小众软件)** : 10-17/10-20/10-21 submissions; the author says there was no response

- **Verified** **Asking friends and colleagues for stars** : author's account

- **Verified** **Organic posts on Xiaohongshu/Zhihu** : author says it was rate-limited; later, reposting accounts brought the traffic

## Why Jiangshan Timeline (DeanChensj/jiangshan-map) took off

> Channel: GitHub · Research date 2026-11-06 · Live at: [deanchen.me/jiangshan-map/](https://deanchen.me/jiangshan-map/)

### One line

A Google engineer (Shangjie Chen, Sunnyvale) built this China dynastic-territory map with a draggable timeline in two and a half weeks using vibe coding. It's pure front-end, free, and GPL-3.0. It works because of **a visual hook everyone gets instantly (drag once, and the territories of the Qin unifying the six states, then the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing shift before your eyes)** . Chinese X and Weibo "resource-sharing accounts" kept reposting it, creating two waves: 10/21–23 and 10/31–11/2. Each wave pushed it onto GitHub Trending, and Trending fed back more stars. It makes no money and was never meant to.

### Data

- Stars: repo created 2026-07-23, but it had only a few dozen stars until October; 10-21 in-repo 111 → 10-28 1614 → 11-06 4346 (forks 500). Recent 7 days +2560, first 7 days +1675; repo single-day peak +781 on 11-03 (source: GitHub repo_day / data card).

- Trendshift (UTC day) by day: 10-21 +245, 10-22 +627, 10-23 +253; 10-31 +207, 11-01 +676, 11-02 +774, 11-03 +316, then each day falls back to about ~250, reaching +122 on 11-06. GitHub Trending: 10-22 all languages #19 / HTML #1; 11-01, 11-02 all languages #20, #21, JavaScript #5, #3 (https://trendshift.io/repositories/310545).

- Contributions: the author made 306 commits; other external contributors made 1–3 each; 23 days merged 173 PRs (Trendshift). Essentially one person iterating rapidly with AI.

- The author's GitHub account has only this one public repo, 233 followers, and lists Google as the employer.

### Where users came from (timeline, with evidence)

1. **The author ran the channels himself and they barely made a splash** (author's account, [deanchen.me/history/atlas/2026/10/25/jiangshan-map-story.htm…](https://deanchen.me/history/atlas/2026/10/25/jiangshan-map-story.html); the same piece on sspai [sspai.com/post/117510](https://sspai.com/post/117510), 10-27): first asked colleagues and friends for stars; posted the English version on LinkedIn (no traction) and Reddit (r/MapPorn and r/ChineseHistory had positive reception); Xiaohongshu and Zhihu posts were "rate-limited"; 10-17 submitted to 阮一峰's weekly (https://github.com/ruanyf/weekly/issues/12463, no reply), 10-20 submitted to GitHubDaily (https://github.com/GitHubDaily/GitHubDaily/issues/1256), and 10-21 posted to the 小众软件 forum (https://meta.appinn.net/t/topic/94075). The author says "there was no response."

2. **First wave: X account "Knowledge Sharing Officer" @knowledgefxg (212K followers) reposted it** . The author's words: "It wasn't until the 'Knowledge Sharing Officer' on X reposted my site that 'Jiangshan Shixu' really reached the public, and within a few days it got over a thousand stars." The timing matches the jump on 10-21: the morning of 10-21, the author found over a hundred new stars overnight. Then @LinearUncle (10-23, "thanks to the blogger for the recommendation") and @hiheimu followed up with reposts, and the Trending HTML chart at #1 amplified it further.

3. **Wrote a "creation story" article himself** : 10-25 blog and 10-27 sspai published "I Used AI to Make a Two-Thousand-Year Map of Chinese History", and 10-29 Tencent News reprinted it (https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20261029A067RA00). That week it held a steady +70–140 per day, a long tail.

4. **Second wave: Chinese resource accounts reposting** . 10-31 X "周览资源" @grgerwcwetwet posted "WOW! Someone turned two thousand years of Chinese history into a draggable dynamic map… already gained 1.9K Stars" (https://x.com/grgerwcwetwet/status/2116500172889076052); 11-01 Weibo "AIGC·非著名程序员" posted the same copy (392 reposts), and AI blogger 张岱樾 followed (https://www.sina.cn/news/detail/5360513270678221.html). These posts used nearly identical copy ("we used to memorize history"), typical resource-account cross-reposting. They match +676 and +774 on 11-01 and 11-02, and pushed it onto Trending JS #3.

5. **Long-tail aggregator sites** : Telegram "Code Stars", aronshare, sucaizy, tg.okhk.net, Threads (Taiwan @david888.chiang, @dingyi), Plurk, Reddit r/BestGitHubRepos (at 3.2k stars), YouTube Shorts. The author says on Xiaohongshu and WeChat Official Accounts "many people reposted my map, and that actually brought me a lot of traffic."

No sign of any paid promotion; no Hacker News discussion either (searches turn up nothing).

### Competitors

| Product | Form | Launched | Scale | How it differs from Jiangshan Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AllHistory spatiotemporal map (allhistory.com/map; App now called 全知识) | Web + iOS | App 2018 | iOS China store: 全知识 61959 rating, 全历史 2769 rating | Commercial company, global scope, requires App download/sign-up; Jiangshan Timeline covers only China, is free and open source, has a rice-paper style, and gives finer modern-ancient place-name comparisons |
| Tan Qixiang's 《中国历史地图集》 and its digital editions (guoxue123, historiamap.com vectorized) | Web pages / scans | Print 1980s | Academic authority | Static volume maps, no continuous change on a draggable timeline; historiamap covers only Spring and Autumn, Warring States, Qin, and Ming |
| CHGIS (Harvard/Fudan China Historical GIS) | Dataset | 2000s | Academic | It's data, not a product; Jiangshan Timeline turns this kind of open data into an interface the public can play with |
| GeaCron, OpenHistoricalMap, OldMapsOnline TimeMap | Web | Years | International | Global and mostly in English, China coverage is coarse; no poetry or figure life paths |
| history.hanzu.de "China historical map · view territory by year" | Web | Not verified | Unknown | Same draggable timeline, but only 14 key years, self-described as a "schematic," with much shallower content |
| wowhistorymap.com, App Store "History Map" (Chen Yong, 2017,9863 rating), "Cool World History" (5431 rating) | Web / iOS | 2017–2022 | Small to mid-sized | Old-school tool, dated UI; no "click a city to trace origins", "click a person to trace events", or AI Skill |
| 山河纪 (zhaoguhong, featured in ruanyf/weekly #12730,10-24) and yelvnanxian/China-Historical-Time-Space-Map (9-24,2 stars) | Open source | 2026-09/10 | Very small | Nearly the same idea, appearing before or around Jiangshan Shixu, but never reshared by the big sharing accounts |

Verdict: **a draggable timeline of historical borders is not a new idea. A full-history map with 2018 years already existed, and it's bigger** . Jiangshan Shixu didn't invent a new category.

### Why this one took off

1. **Strong visual hook, zero friction** : no install, no sign-up. Open the page, drag, and you see "Qin conquers the six states, how big was the Tang" play out. One line like "drag the timeline and it's right in front of you" is enough for a repost caption. Built for screenshot and screen-recording spread.

2. **The topic is mass emotion, not a developer topic** : nostalgia for history-textbook maps, "which dynasty owned my hometown" (LinearUncle's comment), and parents teaching kids history (Reddit, "my son has been glued to this site for days"). That's how it spilled out of the GitHub crowd into mainstream resource accounts.

3. **"Open source on GitHub + thousands of stars" became a content format for Chinese resource accounts** : "Wow! Someone built… and it's on GitHub with 1.9K stars". Resource accounts need this kind of "free, open-source, hidden-gem site" material, and the star count then serves as social proof for the next round of reposts, creating two waves.

4. **Depth that holds up after the first look** : 164 territorial snapshots, 18 dynasty-capital origin traces, 104 people's travel routes (Su Shi, Xuanzang, Zhang Qian), poetry-line geolocation ("snow blocks Lantian pass, the horse won't move"), modern provincial-border X-ray overlays, xuan-paper coloring. Comments like "the data cleaning must have cost a lot of hair" show users noticed the effort, far beyond hanzu.de's 14-year schematic maps.

5. **AI-era narrative bonus** : "A science major built it in two and a half weeks with 200 AI-assisted commits" is a good vibe-coding story. AI-focused resource accounts on X (the "knowledge sharing officer" persona covering "AI programming, tech software, resource sites") were willing to repost it, and Sspai was willing to publish it.

6. **The author was diligent during cold start** : bilingual README, shareable deep links (?year=741&place=Chang'an), embed parameters, GIF demos, and submissions to every recommendation community. Direct effect was limited, but when a big account came across it, all the assets were already ready.

### Differentiation

- Versus commercial products like Quanlishi: **purely Chinese, more granular (prefecture-level divisions, ancient-to-modern place-name lineage, passes, river changes), xuan-paper aesthetic, free and open source with no sign-up** , plus a "click a person to trace events" poetry route and an AI Skill.

- Versus other open-source projects on the same theme: **an order of magnitude higher in completeness and content volume** , and it has an English version.

- Did it break out because of the above? **Partly.** The differentiation ensures people who reshare it find it good when they look, but the direct reason it got seen was resource-account reposts (distribution). Shan He Ji and hanzu.de weren't far behind in product quality, but without big-account reposts they never took off.

### How many people see it and whether anyone copies it

- Visibility: **spreading in small circles and has spilled into mainstream Chinese resource accounts** : 210K-follower big accounts on X, AI bloggers on Weibo reposting it hundreds of times, Sspai, and Tencent News reprints. No major media feature, and no revenue (it doesn't make money).

- Copycats and derivatives: Geeprox/jiangshan-map (a fork expanded into a world history map, covering the earlier 3400–2024 years), lz1219/jiangshan-xingzhi (10-31, an annotation layer), a lazycat-packaged LPK app; the author mentioned a colleague making a hometown history map and a Tang poetry version; content accounts on Xiaohongshu and WeChat Official Accounts reposting its material. No commercial clone app seen yet.

### Takeaways

- Pick a **topic the public already feels something about** (history, geography, poetry) and build it as a web page where "one drag or click and you see the picture". That naturally suits resource-account reposts.

- "Open source on GitHub + star count" is the packaging Chinese resource accounts love. Make your README into material they can screenshot and repost directly (GIFs, deep links, bilingual).

- Communities you submit to won't necessarily pick you up, but **getting reposted by one big sharing account** is enough to scale. You can go straight to these accounts (knowledge sharing officer, weekly resource roundups, Weibo AI bloggers).

- The topic transfers: world history, Japanese history, hometown history, poets' travel routes, the Silk Road… people are already making world-history forks.

- It hasn't monetized commercially. Anyone who wants to earn money could turn the same thing into an education app or teaching tool (parents and teachers are clear users).

### Uncertain

- The time and engagement numbers for the @knowledgefxg repost weren't retrieved (the X page requires login; x-radar's local corpus has no match). The inference that it was 10-20/21 rests only on the author's account and the star timing lining up.

- Scores for the Reddit r/MapPorn and r/ChineseHistory posts weren't retrieved (403).

- The site's traffic is unknown; stars only indicate follows.

- The launch date of history.hanzu.de wasn't verified, so it's unclear whether it was first or a follower.

This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.