Former Site of the Municipal Zhongshan Library

Former Site of the Municipal Zhongshan Library

The former site of the Municipal Zhongshan Library is a protected cultural heritage site of Guangzhou.

The former site of the Municipal Zhongshan Library is located at No. 71 Wende North Road, Yuexiu District. It was built in 1933.

In June 1927, Lin Yuncai, then the Municipal Commissioner (equivalent to today’s mayor), proposed the establishment of the Guangzhou Municipal Zhongshan Library, which later received donations of over 200,000 US dollars (equivalent to more than 300,000 Guangdong Haoyang currency at the time) from 15,000 overseas Chinese in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. The library was finally located at the long-renowned Guangfu Confucian Temple—this site had been home to the Guangzhou Prefecture Confucian School (Confucian Temple), Panshan Academy, and Wanmu Caotang successively since the third year of the Shaosheng era of the Song Dynasty (1097). The project was designed by the renowned architect Lin Keming of the time and completed in October 1933. It is a palatial-style building with green tiles and red eaves, quite magnificent in appearance.

In 1938, when Guangzhou fell to the Japanese army, fortunately, at the beginning of the War of Resistance, the library had evacuated over 50,000 volumes of rare and important books and materials to Longgui in the suburbs and Xiang County in Guangxi for safekeeping. In 1946, the library reopened, taking over more than 120,000 volumes of publications, 168 wall charts from the puppet Municipal Library and Museum, retrieving the books previously stored in Longgui, and recovering some of the books looted by the Japanese army.

During the Republican era, the famous historian Mr. Luo Xianglin and his wife Zhu both served as directors of the library. During Zhu’s tenure as director from 1946 to 1949, despite extremely limited financial and human resources, she reopened the library, recovered most of the scattered books, and pioneered the use of a mobile book van to bring books in large quantities to schools and organizations for reading and research, making it the earliest “bookmobile library” in Guangzhou.

In July 2002, it was designated as part of the sixth batch of Protected Cultural Heritage Sites of Guangzhou by the Guangzhou Municipal People’s Government.

Further Reading:

· Sixth Batch of Protected Cultural Heritage Sites of Guangzhou