Rebuilding an 88-Year-Old Singapore Heritage Site With Claude Code
How I rebuilt the Chang Clan General Association website with Claude Code. 16 bilingual pages, 88 years of heritage preserved, in three hours.
You want to rebuild your website with Claude Code. But you’ve already got an old one, full of content you can’t afford to lose.
This is the part most tutorials skip.
The rebuild. Bilingual, mobile responsive, museum-style editorial layout.
Last weekend I tested the workflow on a real legacy site. The Chang Clan General Association in Singapore. I picked it because I’m a Chang myself, but the workflow applies to any old site you’ve inherited.
Founded 1937. Eighty-eight years of history. 50 committees. 12 sub-clans. The kind of heritage content where every Qing Ming reference, every name in the committee history, every dialect note matters.
The existing site at changclan.sg was Chinese only, not optimised for mobile, and built years ago.
The site I was working from. Chinese only, mobile-broken, dated chrome.
But the CONTENT was the whole point. I could rebuild the design ten times over. I couldn’t lose the history.
The four-step workflow
So I asked Claude Code to do four things:
- Scrape every page of the old site, including the ones buried four clicks deep
- Preserve every Chinese paragraph verbatim, because heritage content is not a thing you paraphrase
- Translate the same content into English, so the next generation can actually engage with it
- Build a bilingual mirror, English at
/, Chinese at/ch, identical structure
Three hours later, 16 pages live. Mobile responsive. Editorial design that reads like a museum foundation.
Every original detail preserved.
The thing I was actually nervous about
The thing I was most nervous about wasn’t the design. It was losing information in the translation. Heritage content has weight. A wrong character in a sub-clan name, a Qing Ming reference flattened into “ancestor day,” and the whole thing reads like it was made by someone who doesn’t get it.
Claude Code held that line better than I expected. The Chinese stayed verbatim. The English read like a careful translation, not a rough one.
See the demo at chang-clan-website.pages.dev
Why this matters for your old site
If you’ve been sitting on an old site you don’t have the budget to redo properly, this kind of rebuild is genuinely possible now. The content doesn’t have to be the casualty.
The same workflow applies to any institution with archives that pre-date the modern web:
- Family businesses with 30 years of project history
- Professional bodies with member directories and event archives
- Schools, clubs, associations, alumni networks
Most of these sites are still on CMS layouts from 2010 because rebuilding them looks expensive. With Claude Code, the cost barrier is gone. I’ve used the same stack across CheckHowMuch.sg (9,700+ pages on HDB resale data) and now this. Once you have the workflow, it scales.
I did this one pro bono, just for fun. Reached out to the Chang Clan and we’ve got a meeting set up for late May. I’ll share more after we sit down. Stay tuned.
Frequently asked
- Can Claude Code handle bilingual websites?
- Yes. Claude Code can preserve original-language content verbatim and generate parallel-language pages with shared component layouts. For the Chang Clan site, English lives at / and Chinese at /ch with identical structure and routing handled at the page level.
- How long does it take to rebuild a legacy website with Claude Code?
- Three hours for a 16-page bilingual site with archival heritage content. The bottleneck is not the code, it is preserving the original content faithfully and structuring it into a clean editorial layout.
- Does Claude Code lose information when translating heritage content?
- Not if you instruct it to preserve original-language paragraphs verbatim and only translate where requested. On the Chang Clan rebuild, the Chinese stayed verbatim and the English read as a careful translation, not a rough one.