Page 214 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Mikun MA, Gang LI & Jianhua WU / A review on the studies of Japan’s plundering of books and literatures from China 213

3.4 Preservation activities for books

Many Chinese people participated in activities to protect books and literatures from being robbed
or destroyed by Japanese, especially the staff of schools, libraries, museums and other cultural
organizations. For the preservation and succession of national culture, they kept struggling for
survival under attack of Japanese during the war. Their activities for self-protection indirectly
reflect the great impact and destruction of book plundering. There were two kinds of self-
protective actions. One was to transfer books to safe places. The other was to search for rare
ancient books dispersed on the art market and try to buy them before they were bought by
foreigners.
The transfer of books to a safe location can be divided into different grades according to the
difficulty and distance. For instance, the relics of the Palace Museum in Beijing were shifted to
Nanjing. Universities and cultural organizations of east China moved to southwest China such
as Chongqing and Guizhou province with their books and equipment. Transferring books to
foreign countries posed the greatest risk and difficulty. Some rare books from the National Peking
Library were shipped to America and were kept in the Library of Congress. In another condition,
after Japan occupied south Yangtze River area, many books in private libraries were dispersed
on the book market. Japanese, Americans and agencies of the puppet government competed to
buy those valuable books. In this dangerous situation, actions had to be taken to save Chinese
cultural properties before it was too late. From the beginning of 1940 to the end of 1941, the
National Central Library established a temporary organization called “Rare Book Preservation
Society” with the support of the Ministry of Education and the Board of Trustees of Sino-British
on Boxer indemnity. The association was made up of celebrities from Hong Kong and Shanghai
who volunteered to protect Chinese ancient books. They saved a number of valuable ancient
books under the risk of being murdered or arrested. Zheng Zhenduo contributed a lot to purchase
ancient books when he was stuck in Shanghai. He wrote about those experiences in a book named
Zheju Sanji which reminds us of the difficulty of protecting our cultural properties. Even some
rare books were bought safely. Until the war was over, it remained a big challenge to keep them
from being burned, bombed or found by the Japanese. As a consequence, books being protected
often had to be moved periodically. Such painstaking actions were recorded in reports of the
“Rare Book Preservation Society” (World Digital Library, 2014). More than 2 000 titles, including
23 000 books saved by the Rare Book Preservation Society were supposed to be transferred to
Feng Pingshan Library of the University of Hong Kong and then re-transferred to the Library of
Congress of America. Unfortunately, those books were robbed to Japan because of the outbreak of
the Pacific War. They were asked to be returned to China after the war, and now they are kept in
the “Central Library in Taipei” (Chen, 2002).