Although I heard a lot about the Oriental Library, I really had a chance to visit him. 20 15 when I visited the school in Tokyo, I often went to the Oriental Library for a while. Although it's far from home, it's already very cold in Tokyo in1February, but the pace wrapped in winter clothes is extremely brisk. That's it!
The building of the Oriental Library is reserved. The most conspicuous buildings on the first floor are museums, reading rooms and office entrances, all in the corner.
Oriental Library is a research-oriented library, which mainly collects documents about oriental studies. Most of the people who come to consult are scholars. Although the reading room is open to the public free of charge, it has few readers, just like an independent small world. The facilities in the reading room are comfortable, but the borrowing method is very old-fashioned. Readers can only take notes in notebooks, or write in notebooks with pencils. If you need to copy, you should stick a note where you need to copy, fill in the application form in detail and hand it over to the staff for handling. Of course, there is a charge for plagiarism!
At first, I complained that plagiarism was a waste of time. Why not let the readers shoot it? Why can't collections be electronic? After a few days, I feel that the old-school approach is quite ritualized, forcing you to read the records carefully and only spend money to copy them when necessary. The rarer things are, the more precious they are.
Touching rare books and periodicals, the yellowed pages have different textures of modern paper. Every book has a history of one hundred years, and it has its own story. The Oriental Library is an intriguing story.
Oriental Library was founded by Kumi Iwasaki (1865- 1955), the third-generation head of Mitsubishi Consortium. He was a rich man born with a golden key. He studied in Fukuzawa Yukichi and in the United States for five years. At the age of 28, he became the president of Mitsubishi Corporation. He was a famous industrialist in Meiji period. He likes Orientalism and is keen on collecting ancient books and classics. The most famous thing is that
Mo Li Xun (1862- 1920) is an Australian of Scottish origin. He loved outdoor exploration since childhood, and later became a doctor, but his legend began in China. Mo Li Xun first set foot in China in 1894. In the following 25 years, he traveled all over China as a Beijing correspondent of The Times, reporting China to the western world. Later, he was hired as a special adviser to the government of the Republic of China, and even attended the Paris Peace Conference as a representative of China.
Mo Li Xun collected about 24,000 western publications about the Far East in his life, a large number of which were about China. These books are his only wealth. He was worried that the love of his life would spread all over the world, so he decided to transfer the whole set of books. This situation has discouraged many collectors. 19 17, Ikumiya Iwasaki spent 35,000 pounds (equivalent to 7 billion yen now) to buy a whole set of books, 1924, and established the Oriental Library as the core. When the US military bombed Tokyo at the end of World War II, the books of the Oriental Library were moved to a safe place for preservation.
How did Mo Li Xun feel when he entrusted the love of his life to Hisaki Iwasaki? There should be no regrets! Three years later, he died in England. Nearly a hundred years later, in the distant Tokyo, the Oriental Library Museum left an exclusive space for Mo, looking around at the bookshelves covered with walls, caring for the treasures he treasured all his life, full of books.