RAYS OF HOPE from a hidden book trove

In recent years Qian Xiaohua has been scouring some of the remotest areas of China looking for ideal places to set up bookshops. Qian, founder of the celebrated Librairie Avant-Garde bookshop in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, aims to build bookshops in villages for more than 10 ethnic groups in the country.

In November 2016 a casual visit to the ancient town Shaxi in Yunnan province left on him a deep impression of picturesque landscape and an area rich in history and ethnic culture.

Shaxi, which sits on the Ancient Tea-Horse Caravan Route, a trade route that started in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and prospered in the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911), used to be an important town that linked the ancient cities of Dali to the south and Lijiang to the north, through which traders would reach Shangri-La. It used to be inhabited by many different ethnic groups, and now 85 percent of the population are Bai.

After the tea horse road declined, Shaxi seems to have been forgotten by progress and overlooked by tourists, who gravitated in great numbers to Lijiang and Dali, until 2002, when the Sideng market square of Shaxi was added to the World Monuments Watch List of 100 Most Endangered Sites.

Ten months after Qian first visited Shaxi he returned, hoping to find an ideal location for a village bookshop under the Librairie Avant-Garde name.

Local governmental officials acted as his guide as he inspected possible sites, including ancient buildings that have been lovingly restored by a Swiss team led by the Chinese architect Huang Yinwu. Among them were the Kuige Tower and stage, Xingjiao Temple in Sifang Street, important Bai ethnic houses in Sideng Street and Guzong Alley.

"Despite the convenience, the center of the ancient town is extremely commercialized and noisy, which is what I endeavor to avoid," Qian says.

"I've opened many bookshops in cities, but now I want to return them to the most ancient places, ones that have many stories to tell. I don't want to see high-rise buildings or wide main roads, but nature and land."

At his request he was shown the neighboring villages of the Bai ethnic community. Qian says that in the countryside he was struck by horses that seemed to live lives of leisure on farmland often bathed in shadows cast by expansive clouds overhead, the smiling faces of villagers passing by carrying bamboo baskets on their back, and the bright sunshine that graced the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau.

When they came to the largest village in the town of Beilong on the eastern bank of the Heihui River, the largest branch of the Lancang River in Yunnan province that runs into Southeast Asia as the Mekong River, Qian says he was instantly attracted by a deserted cob-walled granary, close to which stood a tower about 20 meters high used to cure tobacco leaves.

"In the 1960s people used the granary to process grain, and it was cob-walled," Qian says. "What I found attractive was that it was a bearer of communal memories and the village's history."

On the spot he decided he would transform the granary into a spiritual granary－a bookshop－and the tower in which tobacco used to be cured into a tower of poetry.

"Each village here has a similar tower, the highest building in each village, just like a watchtower, or a beacon, being poetic itself."

Those who accompanied Qian on his reconnaissance tour of Beilong were thus taken aback by his decision to open a bookshop in a place buried in the mountains. Anyone traveling to the area by air has only two airport options, Dali and Lijiang, from which a car trip of two to two and half hours is needed to reach the village. Qian's proposal to open a bookshop there thus ran into one very tough question: Who on earth is going to travel such a long distance to see an obscure old broken granary and tower, and while they are there buy books?

Qian felt that just one person, Huang Yinwu, appreciated both the beauty and the feasibility of his idea. Huang was thus invited to restore the two old buildings and transform them into useful space for a bookshop. Three years later, when people returned, they found two totally different buildings.

Part of the tiles on the eastern and western slanting roofs of the granary were replaced with two rows of glass that run parallel to one another, so that natural light can shine through.

"When I was there, the renovation had not been completed, but I could tell what it would look like when the work was done," says the writer A Yi, who visited the bookshop last September.

"Its main feature is the natural lighting, which borrows the idea from the Parthenon in Athens. If you sit in the bookshop from morning to evening you can see the sunlight moving, gradually shining through one glass pane after another. You can literally feel the change of time, so it would be really cozy there."

The design is smart and discreet, he says, without breaking the granary's original structure but creating a new space.

"In general I didn't make much change to the original structure," Huang says. "The key is how to transform the existing space of the old granary into an atmosphere of a modern bookshop."

Huang, 46, has been living in and working on the restoration of Shaxi for more than 20 years on and off.

Such a design complies with Librairie Avant-Garde's other village bookshops, A Yi says.

"They don't go to a place to build a new house, but to use and renovate an existing old house, and melt their essence into the local culture."

The design adds a new cafe to the 700-square meter yard, also using the local construction style, so it is not difficult for it to blend in the village, Huang says.

To continue the local construction tradition, local workers were recruited to build the cob walls using local materials such as rock, soil and timber, which increased the building time to nearly three years, the longest construction period in the history of Librairie Avant-Garde.

For many visitors, Qian Xiaohua included, the Poetry Tower is stunning, the transformation allowing people to climb to the top on numerous compacted layers of fan-shaped wooden stairs that are attached to a single pillar in the middle. At the skirt of the stairs wire ropes are used to protect climbers, on which hang black and white portraits of poets such as TS Eliot, Wislawa Szymborska and Bei Dao. Climbing the stairs is akin to walking on a book of poems, the portraits of different poets suddenly popping up before your eyes as you use the staircase.

The top of the tower offers another visual feast to visitors: a bird's-eye view of the village.

Poetry is especially important for Qian and his bookshops. The flagship bookshop in Nanjing is well known for its huge collection of poetry, but Qian picked the best poetry collections and the best books of other categories for Shaxi, which filled two trucks that ran 48 hours nonstop before reaching Beilong.

"For me, this is an age of poetry because many people are lost, hoping to find a home for their souls, and that home is poetry," Qian says.

The new bookshop has more than 1,000 titles of poetry collections by poets from home and abroad, surpassing any other branches and even the flagship bookshop in Nanjing.

"In future we plan to invite poets to come here," Qian says. "We'll have poetry recitals and the picturesque landscape, and simple life here may inspire them to create poems about this place."

When cities around China were locked down because of COVID-19, bookshops struggled to survive by selling products online. Celebrated ones such as One-Way Street Bookstore in Beijing called the public for help, calls that seem to have fallen on enough sympathetic ears to give the shops cause for optimism. However, for many other bookshops whose profits had been razor thin even before the virus appeared, and notwithstanding their efforts to drum up business online, the future does not seem as rosy.

Against that backdrop, when the Shaxi Bai Ethnic Bookstore opened in May, those who heard the news or went there were both amazed and worried.

Qian says that since the opening on May 1 the shop has had more visitors than it had expected, "visitors from Shanxi province, Sichuan province, Taiwan, Guangzhou, and so on".

Liu Yating, 28, manager of the bookshop, agrees. A team of four people run the shop from 10 am to 7 pm. The number of visitors usually increases after 11 am.

Besides tourists, villagers make up another main group of visitors to the bookshop, older people and children in particular. The best-selling products are books, accounting for more than half of current sales, Liu says.

"One reason is there are few such bookshops in Yunnan, so locals, not only people from Shaxi but also other places, come to buy books. That's great, but who knows whether that will last?"

Shaxi Bai Ethnic Bookstore is the fifth village bookshop that Qian has opened.

"I'm the son of farmers, so I want to look after the interests of villages. I'm concerned about the fate of farmers because many villages have been emptied out as young people have left to take up jobs in cities and lead more comfortable lives there. I'm keen to do something for farmers because I know how hard their lives are.

"After work farmers have nowhere to go to engage in public life. By opening bookshops in villages we can reconstruct public spaces and cultural life in the countryside. More people will return to villages to start their businesses and realize their dreams, so that the villages can be revived."

Apart from books of literature, poetry and so on, as in many other village bookshops, Shaxi Bai Ethnic Bookstore also sells books about Yunnan, with themes such as the Tea-Horse Caravan Route, Dali, the Bai Ethnic Group and present history, geography, education, custom and the diversified ethnic groups in the province.

Reflecting the many different ethnic groups living in Yunnan, the bookshop also sells books in other languages than Chinese, such as Tibetan and the Dongba characters of the Naxi ethnic group.

Cultural creative products designed with local features, such as postcards, notebooks and fridge magnets that draw inspiration from the local ethnic feline talisman the wa mao, have been particularly popular in the bookshop's first weeks of business.

Qian says that worries about COVID-19 have given him many nights sleepless. In fact it has been the darkest period he has lived through since he founded Librairie Avant-Garde 24 years ago, he says. Three branches remain temporarily closed.

Before the bookshop opened on May 1, Qian arrived in Shaxi. In order to catch the moment of twilight with his lens when the first blue rays shone through the glass on the bookshop's roof, he got up at 5 am on two consecutive mornings. When he walked along the Heihui River in darkness he felt calm, he says, because the sun's rays would soon light up his day.

"Many visitors, particularly those who run guesthouses in Shaxi, have told me that the new bookshop offers them hope," Qian says.

"At times like this you need to be brave and not shrink back but face the storm. Only in standing firm can you hope to win."