Search for Cantonese and you find language schools. Tones, drills, characters, a promise that in six weeks you'll order dim sum. All of it treats the culture as a thing you pass through on the way to the language.
This is the other way round. The subject here is what Cantonese culture notices — what it bothers to have a word for, what it classifies, what it protects, what it finds funny. Language turns up constantly, but as evidence rather than as the lesson.
Kept by an outsider
I don't speak Cantonese. That is worth saying plainly at the top rather than hiding behind a wall of footnotes, and it isn't only a limitation — it's the method. Outsiders notice what insiders stopped seeing. Nobody raised tapping two fingers on the table when their tea is poured has ever had a reason to find it remarkable. I did, which is why it's in here.
So this collection is put together the way a visitor puts one together: by noticing, reading, cross-checking, and asking what a thing encodes. It gets some things wrong. Those get fixed in public on the corrections page, with the date, rather than edited away — a correction is part of an object's history, not an embarrassment.
It's also worth saying that this only works because of the subject. Cantonese culture is unusually forgiving toward outsiders who try and get it slightly wrong. Try the same project on some other cultures and the first mistake ends it.
What gets published, and what waits
The rule is simple: build from what can be checked, and hold back what can't — yet. Literal character meanings, published data, historical record and the gaps between Cantonese and Mandarin are all checkable from documents by anyone, including me.
Register isn't. Whether a word is affectionate or cutting, whether an expression sounds current or dated, how much weight an interjection carries — those need an ear I don't have. Exhibits that depend on them are written and then held until someone who has that ear reads them. That's why the Concepts room currently publishes its map and not yet its entries.
About sources
Where a source is genuinely useful, it's listed at the foot of the exhibit under further reading. It's there as a courtesy to a curious reader, not as proof of anything. An earlier version of this site put a status tag, a confidence level and a verbatim quotation beside every sentence, and the result was a machine for demonstrating rigour that had stopped being readable — and which quietly rejected the most interesting material, because living practices don't come with citations. Everyone knows you don't give a clock as a gift. No authority has ruled on it.
The checking still happens. It just doesn't need to be on stage.
A note on what belongs here
A lot of what gets filed under "Chinese culture" is shared across the whole region and much older than any of its present users — the five phases, the stems and branches, the zodiac. Those aren't Cantonese, and they aren't documented here; they live at hanzi.design. What stays in this collection is what's specifically Cantonese, or specifically what Cantonese speakers did with the inheritance.