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Historical background
The Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei was begun in 1847
as a part of the residential complex of
Jesuit mission at the
village of Xujiahui and grew over the next
100 years to become a scholarly repository.
The Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei on the present
premises has
two buildings. On the north
side is a two-story Portuguese-style chapel
built between 1896 and 1897 as stack rooms,
which were divided into the Chinese-language
section on the first floor and
western-language on the second, giving its
name "Cang Jing Lou", which literally means
"the Building Housing the Canons"; the other
on the south is called the "Mansion of
Priests", originally the residence for the
priests, built between 1867 and 1868 and
then expanded into a four-story mansion.
The Bibliotheca got its present name in
1906. Then in 1956 it became a part of
Shanghai Library, when some other
specialized libraries, including the Royal
Asiatic Society Library, Haiguang Library,
Shang xian tang Library (the International
Institute of China), were merged.
In 2003, the Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei was
overhauled and re-opened after closing to
make way for the metro line construction. It
soon became a new local landmark around the
area as well as a highlight of the city and
even the country’s cultural life.
Originally
the western-language stack room, the custody
of western-language theological and sinological heritages on the second floor of
"Cang Jing Lou" is in an imitation of the
Vatican-style library, with all books
organized in a strict conformity with the
Vatican classification in 36 main categories
and 286 sub-categories.
The stack room used to be the
Chinese-language materials section on the
ground
copies the architectural style of the famous
Ming Dynasty private Library, "Tian Yi Ge"
of Ningbo, which is inspired by the ancient
Chinese philosophy of the "Sky and Earth",
respectively represented by a long narrow
aisle and six smaller parallel rooms (of all
the six smaller rooms, five are now existent
and one, due to the metro construction, is
now part of the pedestrian), the two
elements according to "Yi Jing" (The Classic
of Change) that originate abundant water to
prevent fire.
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Collections
and Services
The
Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei combines
reader service and collection preservation
to academic researches and studies. The
ground quarter is now for exhibitions and
workshops. Regular exhibitions of featured
collections are held in a 200-square
meter-exhibition hall. The second floor is
the public reading area, with a capacity of
30 seats, providing open-shelf reading
services. Services such as the Internet
Public Access Catalog, photocopy and
reference consultation are also available.
The Bibliotheca boasts an extensive holding
of 560,000 volumes of foreign publications
before 1949, which are made up of books,
periodicals and newspapers in nearly 20 different
languages, including Latin, English, German,
French, Japanese, Russia, Hebrew, Greek and
others, covering various disciplines such as
philosophy, literature, history, politics,
sociology, religions, to name a few, among
them the western-language pre-1800 rare
editions, the early Jap anese-language
documents, the Catholic theological and the sinological materials are the most featured
treasures.
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Opening hours:
9:30~19:00, Monday to
Saturday; 10:00~19:00 on
Sunday or national holidays.
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Reader pass required: a library card with
reference reading function.
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Hours for group visit: 14:00~16:00, every
Saturday,
during which the total
number of visitors are no more than 80. In
order to protect the facilities and the
environment, for every group there are only
10 persons are allowed inside and the
duration is limited to 15 minutes.
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Contact:
Postal address: 80 Cao Xi Bei Lu,
Shanghai, 200030
Tel: 021-64874095; Fax: 021-64874108
Email:
www@libnet.sh.cn
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