Shop that keeps passion for reading alive

• Published date: 15 July 2020
• Publication title: Shanghai Daily

USED bookstores, with their musty smell and tantalizing invitation to browse dusty secondhand volumes, have always been favorite haunts of booklovers.

The Fudan Used Bookstore, located on the second floor of a nondescript building on Zhengsu Road in Yangpu District, is no exception.

Piles of old books line the crowded floors in a space no more than 70 square meters.

The bookshop, operated by owner Zhang Qiang, has welcomed students and academics from nearby Fudan University and Tongji University and even had a fair few foreign customers in its nearly two decades of operation. It is among the last of the used bookstores in Shanghai.

"It's another face of Heaven," a reader commented on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), a Chinese Instagram-style platform.

The bookshop holds more than 50,000 titles. It has weathered the coming of modern, sleek bookstores, the electronic book wave and even this year's novel coronavirus pandemic.

Much of its "life force" can be credited to Zhang.

Born in 1977 in the countryside of Jiangsu Province, Zhang grew up in a family of booklovers and was a little bookworm in childhood.

"My father is a sailor who loves reading books," Zhang said. "Once when he returned from a trip, he brought home two large wooden boxes full of books. Influenced by my father, I became addicted to reading. When I was a second grader, I read my first whole book "Xue Gang Fan Tang."

The classic novel is about the Xue Gang Rebellion in the Tang Dynasty (AD619-907), when the grandson of a patriotic general plotted to avenge his murdered family and dethrone Empress Wu Zetian.

Zhang said he loved the legendary heroes in the book. He then went on to read other classics, like "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "The Water Margin."

"At that time, I couldn't understand everything the books were saying, but I was mesmerized by the tales," he said. "Even today, when I open a book, it feels like I'm entering a new world."

Since his family was poor, Zhang's...