About this archive

ATARN — the Asian Traditional Archery Research Network — was founded in Hong Kong in 1998 by Stephen Selby, author of Chinese Archery. For nearly a decade its website and mailing list were the meeting point for the scholars, bowyers and archers who revived Asia’s traditional archery: from Manchu bows and Chinese thumb rings to Korean gungdo, Mongolian Naadam, Ottoman flight archery and Japanese kyūdō.

This site is an unofficial, read-only archive of www.atarn.org as it stood at the end of its active life. The original site was built with 1990s frames and is increasingly fragile; this edition preserves its substance in a modern, searchable form.

What was preserved

• 184 articles (240,786 words) across 18 collections, with original text and images.
• 63 network letters (1999–2004), the chronicle of the community.
• Over a thousand photographs, served at original resolution with generated thumbnails.

What changed

• Frames, visitor counters, the discussion-forum plumbing and 1990s markup are gone; the text is untouched apart from repairs to characters corrupted on the original server.
• Links to pages that no longer exist anywhere are routed to the Wayback Machine.
• Every article links back to its original URL in the footer of the page.

Copyright

All articles and photographs remain the property of their original authors and photographers. ATARN’s stated policy permitted copying for personal use with attribution and prohibited commercial re-use; this archive follows the same rule — see the original copying policy. If you are a rights holder and want material amended or removed, the archive maintainer will comply.

Colophon

Hand-built static HTML — no frameworks, no tracking, no server code. Type is set in Fraunces, Newsreader and Inter, self-hosted. Search runs entirely in your browser. The palette takes its cues from the materials of the composite bow: horn, sinew, birch bark, lacquer and cinnabar.