BEIJING -- Queues were reported in bookstores around China as The Selected Works of Jiang Zemin, former Chinese president, went on sale on Thursday.

Branches of the government-run Xinhua Bookstore chain have trucked in tens of thousands of copies to fill their shelves on the first day of its publication.

In Lhasa, capital of Tibet, prospective readers lined up for Jiang's book as soon as the local Xinhua bookstore opened. Sales assistants, dressed in local costume, were busy helping readers pack their copies.

Nearly half of the 500 copies put on sale were sold in less than an hour, said Qian Hongyong, manager of the Tibet branch of Xinhua Bookstore, the country's largest book selling chain.

Qian said bookstores in the most remote areas of Tibet had started selling the book on Thursday.

In Beijing, subscription for Jiang's works hiked to 67,000 copies by 10 a.m. on Thursday morning in Xidan Bookstore, the capital's largest bookstore, located in downtown Beijing, a source with the local publication distributing group said.

And subscription in Zhongguancun Bookstore, located in Haidian district which is densely peppered with China's top universities, also reached 5,000, said Lu Jiemin, deputy director of the Beijing Distribution Group.

He said his company had sent a dozen of trucks carrying full-load of Jiang's works to several central government departments from late Wednesday to Thursday morning.

Meanwhile, in southwestern China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, 75,072 copies of the three-volume books had arrived at 98 branches of the Xinhua Bookstore by Thursday morning, said a senior manager of the book chain in Guangxi.

"Special counters have been set up in every shop, and red banners hung to hail the publication of Jiang's works," said Fen Baoxin, acting director of Guangxi Xinhua Bookstore.

In Sichuan Province, nearly 50,000 copies of Jiang's books were on sale, according to the provincial Xinhua Bookstore.

A sales manager of Xinan Bookstore, the largest bookstore in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, said she estimated more than 15,000 copies would be sold. The bookstore put 1,000 copies on the shelves on Thursday.

The three volumes comprise 203 of Jiang's reports, speeches, articles, letters, inscriptions and decrees from August 1980 to September 2004, sources with the Party Literature Editing Committee of the CPC Central Committee said Wednesday.

Many of the articles are made public for the first time.