Old books, new tools

For Xie Meng'en, a doctoral student majoring in Chinese language and literature at Peking University, the difference between seeing an ancient book on a screen and reading the original is something that has to be experienced.

"Even the most exquisite catalog is ultimately secondhand," he says. "Only when you see the original can you really develop an eye for it."

At Peking University Library, Xie was looking at one item from a much larger collection. The library holds about 1.6 million ancient volumes and documents, including more than 20,000 titles of rare books totaling over 200,000 volumes, according to Zhong Di, director of the library's ancient documents resources service center.

The collection dates back to 1898, when a library was established alongside the Imperial University of Peking, the predecessor of Peking University. Among the collections added over the following decades were more than 400,000 volumes from Yenching University after the institution was restructured in 1952.

In 2013, the library repurchased the Okura Collection, comprising more than 900 titles and nearly 30,000 volumes, after it had been sold to Japan in the 1910s.

"The Okura Collection was the first large-scale repurchase of dispersed Chinese classics from overseas by a national collecting institution after the founding of New China," Zhong says.

The ancient documents service center has worked with departments including Chinese, history, foreign languages, art and information management to bring classes into the library. Since 2018, it has supported teaching activities more than 100 times, involving over 1,500 teachers and students and using more than 650 types of ancient documents, totaling over 2,000 volumes.

"By bringing the classroom into the library, teachers and students can come into close contact with rare ancient books and better appreciate the characteristics of our collection," Zhong says.

Digitization has made that contact easier.

Xie says older methods of searching for ancient books could involve looking through card catalogs, while earlier databases often contained limited information. Today, students can search by keywords and quickly find details about editions and versions.

But a digital image cannot fully convey the texture of paper, the form of type or the traces left on an original.

After years of reading ancient texts, Xie says he has gradually learned to "take the ancients as one's teachers". Seeing books that have survived for hundreds of years, he says, "you naturally become more cautious, and you dare not act carelessly".

"That kind of nourishment may not be on the curriculum, but it can influence a person's life all the same," he says.