January 11, 2026My Family's Classical Chinese GenealogyI only speak English, and I have always been a little envious of relatives who can read Chinese. My inability to read the language leaves me out of a lot of family history and culture. For example, we have ancestral genealogy documents that I cannot read at all. My relatives tell me not to worry, nobody can really read them. They're written in classical Chinese, a terse literary style that's quite different from the modern language. Scholars and genealogy specialists can work through them, but for most modern Chinese speakers, even literate ones, it's genuinely difficult. Still, I know my relatives can sort of get it. They can make out some of it. To me, it's completely opaque. I know I could OCR and translate a document. But somehow that's not the same as really looking through the original calligraphy and wording, appreciating the old documents as they were written. So today I took one page from the family genealogy and asked Claude Code to help me create this interactive reader.
Actually, I started with ChatGPT, which couldn't do it. And Claude Code couldn't make head or tail of most of the Chinese either. But Gemini turned out to be remarkably good at reading, translating, and explaining the classical text. So with me as a manual go-between, a non-Chinese speaker checking on Chinese, Claude and Gemini worked together to create this app. Claude the master programmer, Gemini the visual character recognition specialist. Another example of a person with very little domain knowledge supervising agents with expertise far beyond my own, to create something that extends my understanding. Maybe it is evidence that the human in the loop doesn't need to be the expert. Perhaps it is sufficient to care enough about the outcome. Try the micro app: Burial Record of Mr. Bao Zhetai Posted by David at January 11, 2026 09:28 PMComments
As someone who reads both classical Chinese and English, I can attest that Gemini and Claude did an impressive job with the translation and demo. One minor note: the same character "業" appears in two adjacent sentences twice, though it doesn't affect the translation itself. Classical Chinese has no punctuation, which adds a significant layer of difficulty. Parsing the text and adding punctuation interleave with understanding — a task that demands a high level of literary knowledge, and one where even scholars can disagree on where a sentence begins or ends. It's a rare gift to have family records this rich and detailed. To read about one's ancestors — their lineage, livelihoods, faith, and contributions to their community — is something genuinely moving and profound. Thank you for sharing this. Posted by: Pei Guo at April 13, 2026 04:20 PMPost a comment
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