Why we built this
If you want to use Chinese frontier models — DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, MiniMax, Doubao — as an international developer, you quickly hit friction: every provider has its own auth scheme, its own billing quirks, and several require mainland-China payment methods or business verification. We run these models in production ourselves, so we built the gateway we wanted to have: one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, one API key, and automatic routing across 16 Chinese LLMs.
The result is HOUJIAYAN API (https://api.houjiayan.com). These are our architecture notes.
Architecture
Client (any OpenAI SDK)
