How this was made

A static site built from 130 records in a public repository. Every figure printed anywhere on it is computed at build time from those files and from three harvests, so a number on a page and a number in the API cannot drift apart.

Where the material comes from. Wikipedia, English and Thai, as a drafting corpus. 8 out-of-copyright books fetched whole from the Internet Archive — Shway Yoe on Burma in 1882, Leslie Milne on the Shan in 1910, the Gazetteer of Upper Burma, Hose and McDougall on Borneo, Handy on the Marquesas. A Lanna volume held in the wichaa.net manuscript corpus, quoted in brief with its page. Wikimedia Commons, for 39 pictures, each with its author and licence printed beside it.

Three counts were run for this site. How many Wikipedia language editions carry an article about each tradition's tattooing, rather than about the people. How many of 4,710 transcribed manuscript pages mention the leg tattoo, by each word it could be called. And where on the body every tradition here puts its marks, sorted into skin that clothing covers and skin it does not.

Tiers. Every claim carries one: cited names a source, harvested came out of an open dataset with its licence, tradition is general knowledge of the practice and is hedged, inference is this project's own reasoning from the above, and field means someone stood there. The record page for anything you doubt has the table at the bottom.

Both languages. Each page is one build function called twice. Where a record has no Thai text the Thai page says so and shows the English rather than machine-translating in silence. 146 fields are written in Thai.

The pictures. No blood, no open wounds, nothing that turns a person into a specimen. Where a historical photograph is used it is named for what it is, including the ones made to be sold to a European audience.

What it does not have is listed at /counted/.

Built 2026-09-19 22:37 · API · GitHub · wichaa.net