Shanghai Library Bibliotheca ZI-KA-WEI (which means Xujiahuai in Shanghainese) is located in two old villas on Caoxi Road N., which were first built by the French Jesuit Society in the mid 1800s.

"We are indeed cheered up by the re-opening of the two weather-beaten buildings. They truly reflect the city's glamorous history and culture," said Wang Renfang, deputy director of the cataloguing department at Shanghai Library.

The city has spent four years renovating the bibliotheca, which takes up an area of 3,700 square meters, and includes a two-story building that was once used by French priest for storing religious books and a four-story building used to be a residence for priests during the 19th century.

The bibliotheca became a part of Shanghai Library in 1956, but was closed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and then shut down again in the late 1980s.

In 1999, the city announced it would spend 10 million yuan (US$1.2 million) to renovate the buildings according to their original European style.

The smaller building will remain a library, while the larger one is home to an exhibition hall on the first floor, a reading room - which can hold 22 people - and four small research rooms for private use on the second floor.

The bibliotheca hosts a collection of 560,000 volumes, transcripts and other historical documents in 20 languages dating back to 1515.

Qu Shijing, director of the British Literature Research Center at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, believes the bibliotheca is of great value for people to look for "historic evidence" of important events in the world.

"Those old foreign documents once provided key evidence to show the boundary between India and China after their border-war in 1960s," said Qu, noting that ideally, the documents should be made into micro-film in case they are damaged.

Among the collection is an 1852 English book called "Reports of the Juries," which recorded China's silk products won a gold medal at the first World Expo in 1851 in London, a Latin-Chinese Dictionary published in Napoleon's time, and a 1939 English textbook explaining Shanghai dialect.

(eastday.com January 13, 2003)