Heritage brands usually translate the culture for the buyer. Kunlun doesn't.

Traditional Chinese and English run as parallel voices, each carrying what the other can't.

Shan Hai Jing and Daoist cosmology. Kunlun is the axis mountain.

Products are named for places on it: Kaiming the gatekeeper, Yaochi the jade pool, Liusha the shifting sands.

Drops are tiers of an ascent, not seasons.

Liangfeng (I), Xuanpu (II), Tianting (III). You climb rather than restock.

DESIGN.md is the source of truth every component defers to.

Specifies script (Traditional, never Simplified), register (literary, between classical and vernacular), and translation direction per context.

Myth copy is Chinese-first, English footnoted. Navigation and cart are English-first. Product names are co-equal.

Next.js 15 App Router. Nested drop routes down to per-colorway product pages.

Stripe Checkout for payment, Supabase for newsletter and preorder capture, Resend for transactional mail.

Every third-party call degrades gracefully, so the site runs end-to-end with no keys set.

Lenis for scroll. The brief was "the pace of mist, not the pace of a feed."

Negative space is treated as a material rather than as padding.

Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Lenis.

Stripe Checkout. Supabase. Resend. Middleware password gate for pre-launch.