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Shanghai Library

After four years of living in a Chinese city with a subway stop named Shanghai Library, my mother is still convinced that libraries do not exist in China.

It's an understandable misconception- no one ever goes to the library. You don't ever see piles of library books when you visit people's houses. Personally, I think this could be because books are cheap, reading on your phone is wildly popular, and Shanghai Library is... well, you'll see.

Surprisingly, it's on Huaihai Lu. Not the hip part, of course, but only a couple blocks away from some very attractive cafés. And the Line 10 Shanghai Library stop is actually seems to be in the parking lot of the library. So, high marks for location and accessibility. Maybe a 4/10 for exterior design.

Maybe you have strong eyes and you can read the text on the sign. If you can, you'll have noticed the essential problem: There is no fiction. Dream of the Red Chamber and translations of Twilight are equally lacking. There is nothing the average person would read for fun.

Somewhere in this library, but not in any book, there is a deep and subtle social commentary on our cultural mores. Perhaps in the West the clear division between fiction and nonfiction, highbrow and lowbrow writing is a manifestation of our anti-intellectual attitudes. We reject the truth and willfully embrace escapist fantasies, while in China, truth and entertainment are one and the same. To learn is to be fascinated, and to provide learning is a public service. And yet we are the ones who stand upon a soapbox and call them willfully blinded by the lies of Xinhua News Agency.

Or maybe Shanghai Library is just really, really boring. Maybe it's not meant to be an interesting place.

Knowledge is power.

Does this library, like the Chinese press, have a secondary purpose as a bastion of Communist might? It's certainly showy- it's one of the tallest libraries in the world, and the second largest in the nation. There are certainly a lot of government and official documents in here. A lot more philosophy than you'd find in a Western library, and a lot more Marx.

Somehow most of the library seems to be one giant reference desk. If you can't read the sign, allow me to quote from it: Catalog Hall. Shanghai Local Documents. Reading Area: Social Sciences. Reading Area: Science & Technology. Reading Area: Ancient Books. World Expo Information. Patents, Abstracts, & Indexes.

Patents, Abstracts, & Indexes.

To their credit, there is one small circulation room, where you can, in fact, check out books. There may even be some fiction in there.

Most of the library's patrons seem to be there to study in a quiet place, rather than to actually read. It's pretty crowded for a library- at least it was when I went at noon last Saturday- but it still has that muffled, sleepy, comforting atmosphere common to libraries all over the world. It's a nice place, but not very useful to the average person.

Right inside the main entrance.

Pretty, right? You can see there's also calligraphy on exhibit on the bottom floor. I think the symbols on the wall are nonsense- I saw a few zodiac signs in there.

There are computers, too, and you can print in black and white for 0.5 RMB, in color for 3, and scan text for 2. There's also a cafeteria (I didn't go, but I smelled it from the stairs, and it was nasty) and a small café selling drinks and cake (which looked delicious).

Be sure to check out the English language fiction section. The whole thins is on one of the Australian shelves in the Friendship Library, which is concealed in the UN section of the Foreign Publications area on the fourth floor.

That is where all the interesting books in English are to be found. I checked. They've all been donated by Australia, so expect nearly all of them to have a heavy pro-Australian theme. But there is some Garth Nix and Scott Westerfield, which will interest fans of popular young adult books (Incidentally, if you are a fan of popular young adult books, please get off our blog.) (Just kidding, we still love you.)

The Friendship Library also has a significant number of books in Spanish, French, Arabic, Korean, and German (lots of German fiction- more than any other foreign language. There are even some children's books). I didn't see any Japanese.

There are a metric shit ton of magazines in the Foreign Publications area. Every shelf seen on the top floor in this photograph is dedicated to magazines. The rest of the floor is dominated by foreign language periodicals, UN reports, and for some reason, philosophy. Which includes a lot of Freud and names I don't recognize, but also, again, a lot of Marx.

Knowledge is power. Hmm.

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