The Commercial Press and the Oriental Library: Site of a Cultural Catastrophe

Basic information

First, to be clear: the Commercial Press was not "founded in Zhabei"

A common error, corrected first:

• the Commercial Press was founded in 1897, at Dechang Lane on Jiangxi Road;
• only in 1904 did it buy more than 80 mu (a Chinese unit of land area) east of Baoshan Road, and build its general affairs office, printing works and editorial office there.

So what Zhabei meant to the Commercial Press was this: here it reached its full flowering, and here it was burned to ash.

Just how big the Commercial Press was

In three sentences:

1. Publishing: it edited and published the renowned Eastern Miscellany, Fiction Monthly, Women's Magazine, Chinese Readers and other journals;
2. Printing: it owned more than 1,200 of the most advanced printing machines in the world at the time, and was the largest publishing and printing enterprise in the Far East;
3. Culture: researchers say its "scale, the number of its subsidiary bodies and the breadth of its business were matched nowhere else in the world's publishing industry", and that its place in the history of modern Chinese thought and culture "was more like that of Peking University in the history of modern scholarship".

Ye Shengtao once said something very weighty:

"Everyone who went to school before the Liberation was touched by the Commercial Press, and everyone has read its books and journals."

The Oriental Library: first in Asia

In 1924 the Commercial Press spent 100,000 yuan to build the Oriental Library on the west side of Baoshan Road (opposite the main works) — a five-storey reinforced-concrete building, the tallest structure in Zhabei at the time.

Its predecessor was Hanfen Lou (the book room of the Press's compilation office). The figures are as follows:

Its holdings surpassed those of the then National Peiping Library (more than 400,000 volumes), ranking first in the country, and it was praised as "the first library of the East" and "a cultural treasure house famous in East Asia".

And it was not only a "collection" — from 1926 it was open to the public at fixed hours every afternoon, receiving more than 30,000 readers a year; in 1928 it started a library training course; in 1929 it set up a children's library.

A private publishing house running a large public library. At the time that was an extraordinary thing.

Tagore came here. In May 1924 the Indian poet Tagore lectured at the Oriental Library, with Xu Zhimo and Lin Huiyin translating throughout.

29 January 1932: within a single day

On the night of 28 January 1932 the Japanese attacked Zhabei.

In the small hours of 29 January they sent aircraft to bomb. The course of events (according to the Press's own historical records):

Late on the night of 28 January the January 28 Incident broke out. After bombing the Shanghai North Railway Station, the next day the Japanese sent six aircraft and dropped bombs on the Commercial Press on Baoshan Road in Zhabei District; the whole of the Press turned into ruins in a sea of fire, with only a single building for storing printing plates left standing. On 1 February Japanese ronin again slipped into the Oriental Library, which the Commercial Press had founded, and set fire to the books; the 460,000 volumes that Zhang Yuanji had gathered and built up by his own hand — including more than 3,700 titles and more than 35,000 volumes of rare old books — were all burned.

The only survivors: more than 5,000 unique and rare volumes that had been stored in a bank vault beforehand — among them 21 volumes of the Yongle Encyclopedia. In 1953, on Zhang Yuanji's proposal and with the approval of the board, this whole batch was donated to the state, and is now held in the National Library of China.

Paper ash fell into Zhang Yuanji's courtyard

There is one record that is the most piercing image of this catastrophe:

Old hands at the Press remember that for those few days a hard north-east wind blew over Shanghai, and the paper ash from Zhabei was carried into the sky over west Shanghai, falling sheet after sheet into the courtyard of Zhang Yuanji's home. When people hurried to the Zhang house to visit him, the 66-year-old man was already too choked to speak.

Zhang Yuanji wrote two lines of verse:

"Twenty years of heart's blood, ground down to a scrap; one instant, and the world of books is turned to the ash of ages."

(For Zhang Yuanji himself see Part Four)

The enemy told the truth himself

This bombing was not a "stray bomb". The commander of the Japanese naval landing force, Koichi Shiozawa, later said something extremely cold-blooded:

"Burn down a few streets in Zhabei, and they can recover in a year or half a year. But burn down the Commercial Press, this most important cultural institution in China, and it can never recover."

That sentence explains the logic of this war completely: bombing streets is destruction; bombing a library is extermination.

But the Press did not fall

On 1 August 1932 the Commercial Press resumed business. From being bombed to resuming business took only half a year.

In a letter to Hu Shi, Zhang Yuanji said:

"The Commercial Press is indeed, as your letter says, not beyond recovery. Even level ground can be raised into a mountain — all the more so when what was overturned is more than a single basketful. If it were simply to perish from this, the Japanese would think far too little of us."

The Press's revival committee was chaired by Zhang Yuanji, with Cai Yuanpei, Hu Shi, Wang Yunwu and Chen Guangfu as members. The work of restoring the Oriental Library went on until the all-out war of resistance broke out, and it had gathered nearly 400,000 volumes (though it had no dedicated building).

Zhang Yuanji also compiled a book called Catalogue of What the Hanfen Fire Left Behind — writing summaries of those surviving rare books, taking the two words "left by the embers", "to record the pain".

What is here today

The present state of the sites (according to relevant historical materials from Jing'an District, Shanghai):

An important reminder: the original buildings were all destroyed in the fires of war. What you see today is not "the old house of the Commercial Press" but the piece of ground where history happened. Please go with the right expectations.

How to read this page of history

The weight of this site lies not in the buildings but in the numbers:

460,000 books, in a single day and night.

Of them, more than 20,000 volumes of local gazetteers — more than 80% of all the local gazetteers in the country.

Many of these books Zhang Yuanji had spent decades gathering — "searching out every collector, emptying his purse at the bookshops, and even in his sixties travelling overseas to photograph and reproduce them".

An old man of 66 had spent twenty years building up a library, and six aircraft burned it away. What he did afterwards was start collecting again.

Nearby, to see in the same trip

• 220–300 Baoshan Road: the place of bloodshed in the Baoshan Road Massacre (1927);
• 155–163 Huiwen Road: the Huzhou Guild Hall (former site of the Shanghai General Trade Union);
• Gongxing Road × Linshan Road: Sanzeng Lane (organ of the CCP Central Bureau);
• around 393 Baoshan Road (Baoshan Lane) and 220–300 Baoshan Road (Sande Lane): where the Kaiming Bookstore, the Beixin Bookshop and the publishing department of the Creation Society and other cultural institutions clustered that year.

This whole stretch was the "Latin Quarter of Shanghai" in the 1920s and 1930s.

Sources: the holdings figures and institutional history follow the Commercial Press website's Retrieving the Oriental Library and Press History: A Publishing Giant, a Scholar of a Generation; the account of the bombing and Zhang Yuanji's deeds follow the Press's own history, China Youth Daily's "Zhang Yuanji, Beyond Recall", and relevant reports on the Shanghai Party History website and in Liberation Daily; the location of the sites follows relevant historical materials from Jing'an District, Shanghai. The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.