August 14, 2026
Re-digitizing the Nine Dragon Trident Page: A Restoration Note
How the 1998 Nine Dragon Trident study was recovered from archived captures, checked line by line, and restored to its original address.
- Author
- GEMAC Archive
- Reading time
- 2 min read
- Tags
- Restoration · Choy Li Fut · Nine Dragon Trident
The page now living at /ninedragon.html was first published in 1998. It documented the Nine Dragon Trident (九龍叉, Gau Lung Cha), a three-pronged weapon of the Choy Li Fut curriculum, for English-language readers at a time when such documentation was scarce on the web.
Restoring it was not a matter of copying files. It was a matter of evidence.
What we started with
The original files no longer exist on any live server. What survived were captures: snapshots taken by the Internet Archive between 1998 and 2013, plus references in printed martial arts newsletters from the period. The captures varied. Some were complete; some had broken images; at least one had been overwritten by a later redesign of the site.
The restoration method
Three rules governed the work.
- Nothing is paraphrased. Where the 1998 text made a factual claim, the restored page either preserves the claim as written or marks it as unverifiable.
- Dates are attached to everything. Each claim carries the date of the capture it was recovered from.
- The address is part of the artifact. The page returns at its original URL, because the English Wikipedia article on Choy Li Fut has cited that address for years. Moving it would break a scholarly citation.
Why the weapon matters
The Nine Dragon Trident sits in a specific place in the Choy Li Fut weapons curriculum: a ceremonial polearm whose name encodes the nine-dragon motif associated with the system’s founding lineage. The restored study covers its construction, its name, and its curriculum place — the same ground the 1998 author covered, at the same address.
What comes next
Two more pages from the same era are being prepared for restoration: the Li Shuwen biography and the Yang Chengfu biography. Both will return at their original addresses with the same sourcing standard: every claim dated, every source named, nothing paraphrased.
The archive grows slowly on purpose. A record is only trustworthy if it says where each fact came from.