Zhang Yuanji: The Man Who Walked the Other Way

Basic facts

An assessment in one line

China Youth Daily once ran an article about Zhang Yuanji whose title was only five characters: "Zhang Yuanji Is Beyond Recall".

In the article is a heavier line:

"Zhang Yuanji and the Commercial Press can, in a sense, almost be equated."

Ye Shengtao's assessment was that Zhang Yuanji "saw the Commercial Press as his life's work".

1902: one man and one company

Zhang Yuanji joined the Commercial Press in 1902. Thereafter he served as head of the editorial office, then manager, then supervisor, and at last chairman.

He and one of the founders of the firm, Xia Ruifang, agreed:

"We should take the promotion of education as our own charge."

He too wrote a poem to declare his aim:

"To make education flourish has been my life's wish; and so I have come to labour in the forest of books."

The result of that ambition was this: the Commercial Press became the most important publisher of textbooks in China before 1949, and one of the main forces that laid the foundations of China's modern education system.

What he did: a checklist

The scale of a "publishing empire"

In Zhang Yuanji's time the Commercial Press became a publishing empire embracing a publishing house, printing works, a library, a film studio, a toy factory, a kindergarten, a school and a whole series of cultural and educational institutions.

The employees who came out of it make a startling list of names (one set of "our employees" listed on the firm's website):

Chen Yun, Hu Yuzhi, Shen Yanbing (Mao Dun), Ye Shengtao, Zheng Zhenduo, Zhou Jianren, Zhu Kezhen, Chen Hanbo and others.

One publishing house, and at the same time the starting point of all these people.

A rule "against his own people"

Zhang Yuanji had a famous principle: he opposed the children of senior staff entering the firm.

• he refused his own son's request to join the Commercial Press;
• he also refused to let the son of Bao Xianchang — one of the firm's founders and head of the printing works — enter the printing works, saying he was willing to join Bao in "making a model for Chinese industry".

In an age when life tenure was very common, he took the initiative to retire from the Commercial Press: in 1926, at 60, Zhang Yuanji applied his "doctrine of loving the new and tiring of the old" to himself, asked of his own accord to retire from the Commercial Press, and no longer managed its business directly.

A man who treated the company as his "life's work" voluntarily took himself off his post.

1932: the most painful year of his life

Late at night on 28 January 1932, the January 28 Incident broke out.

After bombing the Shanghai North Railway Station, the next day the Japanese army sent out 6 aircraft and dropped bombs on the Commercial Press on Baoshan Road in Zhabei, and the whole of the Commercial Press was reduced to ruins in a sea of fire, only the plate store surviving. On 1 February Japanese ronin slipped into the Oriental Library, which the Commercial Press had founded, and set the books alight, and the 460,000 volumes Zhang Yuanji had built up and gathered with his own hands, including more than 3,700 rare old editions running to over 35,000 volumes, were burned in their entirety.

Paper ash falling in his courtyard

Old hands at the Commercial Press remembered that for several days that winter the north-east wind blew hard, and the paper ash of Zhabei drifted over western Shanghai, sheet after sheet falling into the courtyard of Zhang Yuanji's house. When they hurried to the Zhang house to see him, the 66-year-old man was already too choked to speak.

He wrote a couplet:

"Twenty years of heart's blood ground down to a scrap; / in one instant the forest of books is turned to ash."

What pained him most

Of the catastrophe of 1932, what grieved Zhang Yuanji most was that not a single sheet of paper survived of the books on five floors of the Oriental Library. These were books he had spent decades hunting down among collectors, buying up from bookshops with all he had, and even, past sixty, travelling overseas to photograph and reproduce, gathering volume by volume through a hundred turns and a thousand hardships.

A friend recorded the scene at the time: "flying ash filled the sky, torn paper fell to the ground"; another recalled: "the paper ash in the air danced on the wind like white butterflies".

What he did within 40 days

This is where Zhang Yuanji is most admirable.

Less than two weeks after the disaster, he wrote in a letter in reply to Hu Shi:

"The Commercial Press is indeed as your letter says — it is not necessarily beyond recovery. Level ground can still be made a mountain, and all the more so when what has been overturned is more than a single basketful. If it were simply to vanish from this point on, it would be letting the Japanese hold it too cheap."

In another letter he said:

"If the Commercial Press were simply to vanish from this point on, it would be letting the Japanese hold it too cheap. If you are optimistic, then I too dare not be pessimistic."

Then he returned to the Commercial Press, threw himself alongside the then general manager Wang Yunwu into the work of revival, worked ten-odd hours a day, and kept at it until the Commercial Press reopened in August.

The Commercial Press reopened on 1 August 1932. From the bombing to the reopening: half a year.

Catalogue of the Books Remaining from the Hanfen Tower after the Flames

Zhang Yuanji also compiled a book, the Catalogue of the Books Remaining from the Hanfen Tower after the Flames, writing summary notices for that surviving batch of rare editions.

In his preface Zhang Yuanji said that the two words "remaining from the flames" were chosen to "record the pain".

More than 5,300 rare volumes from the Hanfen Tower collection survived only because in 1924, to avoid the fighting of the Northern Expedition, they had been stored in a warehouse of the Jincheng Bank in Shanghai. This batch of "things remaining from the flames" includes:

One book, recording one fire. That was Zhang Yuanji's way of "recording the pain".

1953: everything donated

In 1953, on Zhang Yuanji's proposal and with the approval of the Commercial Press board:

this sole surviving batch of "flame-remaining" rare editions from the Hanfen Tower, together with the collections of the rebuilt Oriental Library, were all donated to the Ministry of Culture of the Central People's Government, and were later housed in the Beijing Library (today's National Library of China).

A man who spent twenty years gathering books, had them burned, gathered them again from scratch, and in the end handed over everything that remained.

A decision to "break an oath"

After the failure of the Reform Movement of 1898, Zhang Yuanji had sworn never to enter politics again.

But in August 1949, Chen Yun, on official business in Shanghai, called on Zhang Yuanji, chairman of the Commercial Press, and invited him into politics, to contribute to the building of New China.

"Zhang Yuanji was deeply moved, broke the oath he had sworn never to enter politics after the failure of the Reform Movement, took part in the Political Consultative Conference, and threw himself into political life."

An 82-year-old man broke an oath he had kept for half a century, for the sake of a new country.

(On Chen Yun's relationship with the Commercial Press, see the next piece.)

1949: Chen Yun comes "to look at the signboard"

There is a very moving record. The September 1949 issue of Commercial Staff carried "Welcoming Comrade Chen Yun to Shanghai":

"Comrade Chen Yun was a member of our circulation office's staff before the sixteenth year of the Republic, one of the first committee members of the circulation office's staff union, and one of the leaders of the Commercial Press's first great strike… Many people have not seen him, and many more do not know him by sight, but wherever he goes he always looks in at the Commercial Press, as if it were his second family."

Decades later (in the 1970s), when Chen Yun returned to Shanghai and visited the old Commercial Press site, the first thing he asked on entering was: "Where has the signboard gone?"

Chen Yun meant the old brass-lettered signboard of the Commercial Press; he had not seen it on entering, and grew anxious. "It's still there, still there." The man receiving him hurriedly led Chen Yun outside and pointed out to him the brass plate hung on the outer wall, two men's height up. The plate was small and hung high, and to see it more clearly Chen Yun actually ran out into the middle of the road, heedless of the traffic on Henan Road.

A national leader ran out into the middle of the road to see a brass plate clearly.

How to go and see him today

• the former site of the Commercial Press: around Lane 499, Baoshan Road;
• the site of the Oriental Library: 584 Baoshan Road, a Shanghai municipal cultural relic protection unit;
• Catalogue of the Books Remaining from the Hanfen Tower after the Flames: consultable in libraries (a Commercial Press publication);
• the Shanghai Railway Museum (200 Tianmu East Road): not far from the old Commercial Press site, and easily combined with it.

A closing line

Zhang Yuanji's life can be read against what happened to the Oriental Library:

He spent twenty years gathering books → they were burned in a single day and night → he said "level ground can still be made a mountain" → he began again from scratch → and in the end he gave it all away.

The title of the China Youth Daily article was "Zhang Yuanji Is Beyond Recall". He is "beyond recall" probably not because his achievements cannot be surpassed, but because:

That spirit — burned to nothing and still saying "level ground can still be made a mountain" — is hard to find in a second person.

Sources: "Zhang Yuanji Is Beyond Recall" in China Youth Daily; the Commercial Press house history "House History: A Publishing Giant, a Man of Pure Confucian Learning"; "Recovering the Past · The Oriental Library" on the Commercial Press website; "The 'Past and Present Lives' of the Hanfen Tower Collection" by the China Publishing Group; and "A Special Issue on National Calamity from Seventy Years Ago" on People's Daily Online; the passages about Chen Yun calling on Zhang Yuanji and looking at the signboard follow "Chen Yun and the Commercial Press" by the Commercial Press. The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.