Former Site of the National Central Library

Former Site of the National Central Library

The Former Site of the National Central Library is a cultural heritage protection unit of Jiangsu Province.

The National Central Library was a national-level library officially initiated by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China government in 1933.

On April 21, 1933, the Preparatory Office of the National Central Library was formally established, with Jiang Fucheng appointed as the head of the preparatory office. The preparatory office rented a civilian house at Shatangyuan in Nanjing as its office location and moved to a compound at No. 48 Chengxian Street by the Pearl River in 1936. On September 1 of that year, the reading room was opened to the public.

In August 1937, due to Japanese air raids, the preparatory office was ordered to relocate westward to Chongqing. Jiang Fucheng, who was prepared to “die for the books,” personally supervised the relocation. Along the way, they traveled along the Yangtze River, setting up offices and opening reading rooms at every stop, essentially functioning as a traveling library. In early 1938, the preparatory office arrived in Chongqing and immediately opened a reference reading room. The following March, it was evacuated to Baisha Town, Jiangjin, Sichuan, where a public reading room was also set up in the town. On August 1, 1940, the Central Library was officially established, and in June of the following year, Jiang Fucheng was appointed as the library director.

During the War of Resistance against Japan, patriotic figures such as Zheng Zhenduo risked their lives to purchase over 100,000 volumes of rare books scattered in bookstores in the then-occupied Shanghai.

In the year following the victory of the War of Resistance, the Central Library returned to Chengxian Street in Nanjing. It reclaimed some of the books previously stored in Nanjing, received books from puppet regime institutions and the East Asia Common Culture College in Shanghai, and also took over the “Ze Cun Library” at No. 2 Yihelu and its collection of precious ancient texts. By this time, the Central Library’s collection had reached over 1.2 million volumes. The reading room was soon reopened, and a North City Reading Room was established at the former site of the Ze Cun Library. In 1947, a three-story reading building was constructed within the Chengxian Street compound, which remains the only surviving structure of the National Central Library to this day.

In the winter of 1948, some personnel of the National Central Library were ordered to select over 130,000 precious volumes, including all the rare editions from the Ze Cun Library, and transport them to Taiwan in three batches via ship. Jiang Fucheng, Qu Wanli, and others went to Taiwan with them.

In March 1950, the National Central Library was renamed Nanjing Library. The renowned historian He Changqun became the first director after the regime change. In December 2011, the former site of the National Central Library was listed as a cultural heritage protection unit of Jiangsu Province.

Further Reading:

· Seventh Batch of Cultural Heritage Protection Units of Jiangsu Province