Centennial Book Fragrance Red Memory
Century of books, red memories. In Tianchang City, Anhui Province, there is an old small Western-style building, experiencing wind, frost, rain and snow, walking through the plain years, but still beautiful, in the silent place to witness the continuation of a vein of books and the inheritance of red genes...
Today's Tianchang Library
Taken at the Tencho Library in the 1950s
100 years ago, the small town of Tianchang in eastern Anhui province came to a new county magistrate named Zhang Ming. He presided over the construction of a small Western-style building that opened people's eyes. The building body is made of green bricks and white seams, vermilion doors and windows, and even the planks in the building are all made of red pine imported from the United States. This small building of Chinese and Western is not a villa mansion or a yamen lobby. From the beginning, it was a standard "library", covering an area of 338.8 square meters, according to the "collection, borrowing, reading" three-stage combination layout. Many years later, people learned that in that year, more than 600 miles away, in the depths of the South Lake in Jiaxing, Zhejiang, the ripples of a red boat were spreading in a circle. Soon, the library will be the birthplace of the small town Red Storm...
The founder of the library, Zhang Ming, has been in the United States for many years and is open-minded. He hopes that the library can "open up the wisdom of the people and spread new knowledge." What he did not expect was that this place would later become a distribution center for the red gene, a place for the dissemination of progressive ideas, and a place of contact for underground work, providing unique conditions for those brave "Prometheus" to "obtain" the seeds of revolution...
Soon after the opening of the Tianchang Library, revolutionary books and new literary newspapers and periodicals from Shanghai and Nanjing entered Tianchang through open channels. The young people entered the reading room and came into contact with Marxism-Leninism, and their thinking became more and more progressive. At that time, the use of book lending to spread the revolution became the same choice for many readers. According to records, the revolutionary youth Huang Rangzhi once set up a library in Tianchangtong Town to secretly collect the "Communist Manifesto" and so on for readers to circulate; Zhou Yuanbing, who served as deputy commissioner of the East Branch office of the Anti-Japanese Base Area in Huainan, and Liang Minglun, who was the secretary of the Tianchang County CPC Committee, were loyal readers of the Tianchang Library in their early years. Inside and outside the book, we find the correct path for national independence and the liberation of the people.
In 1949, the transport regiment of Tianchang County (then Binghui County) participating in the Battle of crossing the river took a group photo in front of the Tianchang Library
In the glory years, the tortuous experience of the Tianchang Library became a projection of the fate of the country and the nation. In 1937, the Anti-Japanese War broke out, the county seat of Tianchang fell, and the library was occupied by the Japanese Kou and became a human demon cave for the massacre of revolutionary volunteers, and tens of thousands of books were burned. The young people went into the fields and, under the leadership of the Party, organized, propagated, and mobilized the suffering peasants, igniting the flames of resistance. Even an enlightened gentry who had served as the director of the Tianchang Library joined the revolutionary ranks. People took up steel guns, fought on the hills, by the river, at the lake, and fired angry bullets at the enemy...
In 1949, people finally ushered in the birth of new China, and on May 22 of that year, the warriors of the Tianchang County (then Binghui County) transport regiment that participated in the Battle of the Crossing River returned home after a hundred battles, leaving a precious historical image in front of the small building of the Tianchang Library for the rest of their lives...
Be the same age as the party and walk with the party. After a hundred years of vicissitudes, the scenery of the Tianchang Library is still the same, allowing future generations to relive the red legend in the book... Tianchang people love books, heavy books, collect books, and protect books, and have been in the wind and rain for a hundred years, and their original intentions have not changed. Today, Tianchang already has a modern book building and a unique shape of the city academy, library, study, so that happy people here to feel the beauty of nature, love in the world, absorb the power of upward goodness... (Author: Li Lian)
Source: Propaganda Department of Chuzhou Municipal Party Committee
Preliminary: Deng Zhonghang
Review: Anjie Zheng
Review: Ji Fang
2021.5.20 Public Service Announcement