RAYS OF HOPE from a hidden book trove

"Despite the convenience, the center of the ancient town is extremely commercialized and noisy, which is what I endeavor to avoid," Qian says.

"I've opened many bookshops in cities, but now I want to return them to the most ancient places, ones that have many stories to tell. I don't want to see high-rise buildings or wide main roads, but nature and land."

At his request he was shown the neighboring villages of the Bai ethnic community. Qian says that in the countryside he was struck by horses that seemed to live lives of leisure on farmland often bathed in shadows cast by expansive clouds overhead, the smiling faces of villagers passing by carrying bamboo baskets on their back, and the bright sunshine that graced the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau.

When they came to the largest village in the town of Beilong on the eastern bank of the Heihui River, the largest branch of the Lancang River in Yunnan province that runs into Southeast Asia as the Mekong River, Qian says he was instantly attracted by a deserted cob-walled granary, close to which stood a tower about 20 meters high used to cure tobacco leaves.

"In the 1960s people used the granary to process grain, and it was cob-walled," Qian says. "What I found attractive was that it was a bearer of communal memories and the village's history."

On the spot he decided he would transform the granary into a spiritual granary－a bookshop－and the tower in which tobacco used to be cured into a tower of poetry.

"Each village here has a similar tower, the highest building in each village, just like a watchtower, or a beacon, being poetic itself."

Those who accompanied Qian on his reconnaissance tour of Beilong were thus taken aback by his decision to open a bookshop in a place buried in the mountains. Anyone traveling to the area by air has only two airport options, Dali and Lijiang, from which a car trip of two to two and half hours is needed to reach the village. Qian's proposal to open a bookshop there thus ran into one very tough question: Who on earth is going to travel such a long distance to see an obscure old broken granary and tower, and while they are there buy books?