A Bookstore's Survival and Destruction Hang on Peking University's Troublesome Walls

"In an age when books are no longer quite books, is it suicide to go on selling books as books and running a bookstore as a bookstore?"

At 10 a.m. on February 23, Deng Yuhong tidied her 40-square-meter apartment, then rode the bus two stops to No. 262 Chengfu Road in Beijing's Haidian district. Douban Bookstore, which she and her husband Qing Song have run there for 10 years, is 62 square meters and holds 20,000 books. It opens at 9 every morning and closes at 9:30 every night.

The clerk was not quietly mopping the floor or straightening the shelves as she usually did. She explained in a panic: minutes earlier, more than a dozen people in the uniforms of the chengguan, China's urban management officers, had come in. They photographed everything and said the spot where the bookstore stands used to be a wall. The doors and windows facing the street had to be sealed up within a month, by the shop itself, and the original state restored. "Otherwise, they'll come and seal it themselves."

Today Appliances, Yongkang Dental Clinic and the Mohezi Picture-Book Library next door had received the same notice. All of them occupy street-facing ground-floor units in the Zhongke Keyi office building, and most have been there for nearly 10 years. The shopfronts across the street, managed by the Lanqiying neighborhood, and the street-facing units nearby that answer directly to the Zhongguancun Subdistrict Office, were untouched.

The visitors left behind a form titled "Notice on Cooperating with the Special Campaign to Rectify Walls Broken Open for Storefronts." To Deng Yuhong and her neighbors it was full of holes. The line about "restoring the original structure of the residential building" did not apply, because the Zhongke Keyi building is not housing but a factory block belonging to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, leased out in its entirety 20 years ago. The deadline had already passed — "complete rectification by January 27, 2017." And although it was signed by the Zhongguancun Area Comprehensive Law Enforcement Center, it carried no official seal.

The holes reassured the other three shopkeepers, who decided there was room to maneuver before anyone sealed anything. Two weeks after February 23, no one had pressed the property manager for news and no one had started looking for another place. "The people at Zhongke Keyi are negotiating with the subdistrict office," a staff member at the Mohezi Picture-Book Library told QDaily. "They say the problem is that this building was never registered with the subdistrict. But all of us shops are registered with the Administration for Industry and Commerce, and none of us are dirty or disorderly. I'm still fairly optimistic about this."

For Deng Yuhong and Qing Song it was not so simple. In January they had been told that rent would rise from 6.5 to 8 yuan per square meter, that shops under 100 square meters would pay by the year instead of by the quarter, and that they had two months to decide whether to renew. Douban Bookstore is the only one of the four shops smaller than 100 square meters. The 40,000 yuan they used to pay each quarter became a single payment of 180,000 yuan, due in full before May.

"181,040 yuan. We don't have that much cash to turn over. The store takes in 30,000 yuan a month and barely breaks even," Deng Yuhong said. They spent the Lunar New Year worrying. After going back and forth, they said yes on February 22, filed their annual business-license review and paid the last quarter's 40,000 yuan. Deng Yuhong also rushed out a one-year plan to bring in more cash: crowdfund a tenth-anniversary tote bag for Douban Bookstore's Wuhan branch, print and sell more postcards, and buy more new books at steeper discounts that would sell faster.

The single sheet of paper that came on February 23 was the first thing in more than a decade of running a bookstore to truly frighten the couple.

1

Deng Yuhong, 37, from Jiangxi, and Qing Song, 36, from Sichuan, both came to Beijing at around 18. Neither has worked anywhere but bookstores since.

They met at Fengrusong. In 1990s Zhongguancun, Fengrusong (1995), All Sages Bookstore (1993) and Guolinfeng (1997) were known together as the three great private academic bookstores, founded respectively by Wang Wei, an associate professor of philosophy at Peking University; Liu Suli, a professor at China University of Political Science and Law; and Ouyang Xu, a graduate of Peking University's Chinese department.

It was the era when private academic bookstores were rising: Baitong in Hangzhou, Librairie Avant-Garde in Nanjing, Sisyphe in Guizhou, Xueren in Changchun, Jifeng in Shanghai took root all over the country. Bi Wenchang described the moment in an article published in China Youth Daily in April 2005: "China had run into a problem of academic books being hard to publish and hard to distribute. Xinhua Bookstore, the main channel, refused to take on the distribution of academic books and lacked staff who fully understood their value; it relied mainly on its monopoly over primary and secondary school textbooks to keep itself profitable. It was at this point that some scholars and writers began to found private bookstores of high quality for academic and cultural books."

Fengrusong began as a shop of about 40 square meters by Peking University's South Gate. Three months after it opened it moved into the basement of the Ziyuan West Building just outside the gate and grew to 860 square meters. A long, narrow corridor ran through it, hung with oil paintings and set with Eight Immortals chairs where readers could sit and read. It was open from 9 in the morning to 9 at night, four hours later than Xinhua Bookstore.

Here Qing Song relaxed completely for the first time. He was born in a small county town near Neijiang, Sichuan, to parents who were open-minded and also very careless. They sent him off young to live with relatives in Neijiang so he could get a better education at a good middle school nearby, and never got around to finding out whether their son was happy there. It is a stretch of his life he does not like to discuss in detail, bound up with violence and loneliness, and it left him withdrawn and closed off. The acceptance letter that reached him in the summer of 1999, admitting him to study Chinese literature, carried a second meaning: escape from home, a new life in Beijing.

After finishing his degree, Qing Song planned to sit the graduate exam and study under Professor Che Jinshan in Peking University's Chinese department. In 2003 he rented a room in Langrunyuan beside the campus and took a part-time job nearby at Fengrusong: three hours a day, 300 yuan a month. The man who trained him was Lu Dejin, who had bought books for All Sages Bookstore before coming to Fengrusong to run the shop floor.

As Qing Song remembers it, Fengrusong gathered a great many people who loved books, and Lu Dejin was the reformer among them. He was always proposing new ways to sort and display them — narrow themed tables like "China Through Western Eyes" or "Redology," the study of Dream of the Red Chamber. He could also spot a bestseller among neglected titles. Guns, Germs, and Steel had been sitting in the storeroom with no one paying it any attention; Lu dug it out and put it on a shelf, and it sold more than a hundred copies in a week. His stock line: "If you can spend five minutes making sense of a book you haven't read for a reader, then you're fit to work in a bookstore."

The old hands dismissed him; Qing Song, newly hired, was in awe and called him Master Lu. The normal day ran from 9 in the morning to 6 in the evening; after it ended he would eat in a Peking University dining hall, then run back to the store to talk with Lu. There were only two subjects: editions and publishers, and how to run a good bookstore.

"That was a turning point for me. A bookstore is quiet and simple; it was a release. The more I talked with people about books, the more I opened up," Qing Song said. He gave up on graduate school, and a year after he started he became a full-time employee.

But in 2004, after the founder's divorce, Fengrusong passed into his wife's hands. In Deng Yuhong's words, "someone who didn't understand books brought in a bunch of relatives who didn't understand books either to run it." Lu Dejin quit that year. Qing Song was demoted from senior clerk in charge of the floor to the one person producing the store's in-house magazine — "recommending books, writing a few reviews." It lasted three issues. Three months after Lu left, Qing Song left Fengrusong too.

By then Lu Dejin had been running a book stall at Peking University's weekend cultural market for a while. When he heard Qing Song was out of work, he handed the stall over to him. Buying publishers' unsold stock cheap from wholesalers around the country and reselling it cheap was another way to survive that Lu had pointed out. "He was 37. Building a book stall up from nothing again might have been too hard on him."

Qing Song and Deng Yuhong were lucky. Just after taking over the stall they grabbed a big lot of the New Century Universal Library from a wholesaler in Jiangxi, a humanities and social science series not often seen on the market then. Their stall was a meter wide; it took the two of them a whole morning, hauling books with a bicycle and a small handcart, to cover two-thirds of it. The books sold: 2,000 copies in a single weekend.

Soon they had nowhere to put what they bought. Deng Yuhong and Qing Song first rented a room of less than 10 square meters next to their place in Langrunyuan, bought five or six shelves, and on Youth Day, May 4, turned it into Chenxiang Bookroom. Then they moved to a one-bedroom apartment in the Furongli complex. The two of them slept in what passed for a living room, seven or eight square meters; the bedroom was given over entirely to books, open only to regulars from the weekend market.

Not until 2005, when they opened a shop on Chengfu Road next to All Sages Bookstore, did "Douban Bookstore" appear in official form on the Administration for Industry and Commerce's register. The location was Lu Dejin's idea too: it is good to sit in the shade of a big tree. Douban has moved twice since — once because the street was rebuilt, which also pushed All Sages 200 meters east, and once because the clothing shop it shared a lease with pulled out early — but through every move the basic rule held: don't go far from All Sages.

2

Tong Yan came to work as a clerk at Douban Bookstore in October 2006. What drew her was not the bookstore. It was Chengfu Road.

The Lanqiying stretch of Chengfu Road is a peculiar place. Bookstores survive there, miraculously; they move around but never leave. Walking east from Peking University's East Gate, the first one you meet is Douban. About a hundred meters further east, across a pedestrian bridge, is the academic bookstore All Sages and its blue sign. To its right, next to Plato Café, are Chenguang, a bookstore for religion, and Yufeng, a bookstore for women.

Between 2006 and 2012, Michael Pettis — a finance professor at Peking University and the founder of Maybe Mars, China's largest independent record label — ran a bar called D-22 at No. 242 Chengfu Road, which pulled in artists and independent musicians of every kind. "We used to joke that if you dropped a bomb on D-22, you'd wipe out the entire Chinese music scene, because everyone was there," Michael Pettis said in an interview.

These people and the spaces they built gave Lanqiying its character. For nearly 20 years people came from all over the country to hold forth in its bookstores, cafés and bars — about music, literature, philosophy, world affairs, every serious subject there is — and together they made a utopia for intellectuals and musicians. Popular subjects like startups and the internet found little room here; Zhongguancun Entrepreneurship Street, 3.8 kilometers away, was their ground.

Tong Yan sums up her time at Douban as "biding her time through hardship." She loved folk music, and after graduating in Dalian in 2006 she came to Beijing to make a career of it. That winter she shared a bed space in a student dormitory near the Beijing Institute of Technology with a few self-study examinees from Beijing Language and Culture University, 280 yuan a month. 13Club on Chengfu Road was her favorite place, because independent folk acts played there and Zhou Yunpeng sometimes had a residency.

"It really was a terrible time for the industry. There wasn't one independent music company of any size, only something called Pocket Music. The traditional labels were all collapsing and reshuffling. There were no jobs." After yet another failed interview, Tong Yan began thinking about leaving Beijing. Then she walked out of 13Club, saw the help-wanted notice posted next door at Douban Bookstore, and decided that a stretch of work as a clerk — somewhere to "quiet down" and cushion the disappointment — was the better choice.

Protected by the Chengfu Road utopia, Douban Bookstore did reasonably well. It was not as solemn as All Sages: no unsmiling clerks, no space for regular academic lectures, and no books at full price. The front is barely half a meter wide; step inside and shelves rise around you to the ceiling. Deng Yuhong works the register at the desk by the door — an old yellow desk under a striped cloth, holding a few boxes of postcards and the rubber stamps that read "Reading Is Living" and "Douban Bookstore," plus a computer for logging stock changes and running the store's social accounts. That is the checkout counter.

The theme from the Japanese film Still Walking plays on a loop. A small blackboard lists this month's recommendations: A Walk in the Country and In and Out of the Garden. A huge black-and-white photograph faces the door: James Joyce sitting in Shakespeare and Company, talking with friends. Poems in Chinese and English are scattered casually on the walls and shelves — "Song of Dusk" by the Austrian poet Georg Trakl, Lin Huiyin's "April of This World." If a reader wants a particular book the store doesn't have, Deng Yuhong will look up the stock on the All Sages website. It comes close to the bookstore Lu Dejin once imagined: real taste in what it carries, and easy to walk into — a neighborhood bookstore in the classic sense.

Qing Song picks the books out of publishers' unsold stock, mostly at 50 to 60 percent of cover price. People who come in rarely notice that the man in the red jacket owns the place. He is on the short side, wears gold-rimmed glasses and says little, and circles the shelves endlessly putting back what customers have pulled out of order. Only publishers, editions and translators get him talking.

Deng Yuhong likes to record the odd visitors in her Douban journal: the charity worker who came to buy books, complained they were too expensive and said they should go for a tenth of cover price; Mr. Zeng, past 80, who comes by once or twice a day before going to Peking University Third Hospital to see his wife; the girl selling 500 books who couldn't bear to part with them all at once and brought them in over two trips; the man in a black suit who looked like an estate agent and asked, "Do I look like a cultured person?"

Qing Song likes to talk about 2009 and 2010, Douban Bookstore's golden age as he sees it. In the summer of 2010 he heard that Zhonghua Book Company had a rare batch of classical texts marked down, and spent more than 10,000 yuan on over 100 bundles. It was midnight by the time he got back to the store, but the street outside was lined with bicycles and the doorway was full of people, most of them Peking University students who had heard in advance that the classics were arriving and rushed over to grab them. The place reeked of sweat. It was chaos, but coordinated chaos: people helped carry the bundles to the cramped storeroom at the back and opened them there. As each book came out, someone inside shouted the title, whoever wanted it called back from the front room, and the book traveled hand to hand through the crowd until it reached them.

"Too bad livestreaming didn't exist yet. That was a scene worth broadcasting," Qing Song said with a sigh.

On the buying and location strategy Lu Dejin pointed them toward, Qing Song and Deng Yuhong kept Douban Bookstore alive for 10 years. They also tried branches near Wuhan University, the old Southwest Associated University site and Sichuan University. The last two lost money and closed after a year, leaving one store by Peking University and one by Wuhan University. In the same years two of the three great academic bookstores, Fengrusong and Guolinfeng, both shut down.

3

Tong Yan stayed at Douban Bookstore only half a year. She lived in Beijing four more years, founded the independent music label Daomadan, then moved south, started making her own music and became a folk singer with three albums out.

Looking back at Douban, she calls it "a beautiful and very contradictory thing." She admires Qing Song and Deng Yuhong's attitude: "How many people can say they do work they love and are good at? I think that's the most basic thing a person should be able to do in life." At the same time, she thinks there is something wrong with the fact that Douban Bookstore has always had a hard time staying alive. "Maybe they're just not good at business. They love books, but they haven't become better merchants."

Between 1995 and 1998, at least 1,500 to 1,600 independent bookstores opened in mainland China. Seven years later three-quarters of them had closed or turned into something else, for all sorts of reasons.

To stay alive, bookstores had to find new businesses to save themselves. Ouyang Xu, who owned Guolinfeng, ran an advertising company, Guofeng Advertising, alongside the bookstore. One story going around held that "Guofeng Advertising makes tens of millions of yuan a year — it can afford to keep a bookstore for nothing." In 2006 Guolinfeng was upgraded into Third Pole Bookstore, and another story went round: the Haidian Book Building that housed Third Pole belonged to Third Pole in its entirety, and its income came mainly from rent. It ran a bookstore at all, the story went, because Haidian's plan for a cultural and creative industry zone needed a landmark building.

Rumor and all, Third Pole went bankrupt in 2009. Its statements that year showed net assets of negative 18 million yuan and total losses of about 78 million. The name that made itself known 20 years ago as one of "Zhongguancun's three great academic bookstores" is now Guofeng Group, with businesses in advertising, education, tourism and real estate — everything but books.

At other bookstores, library supply became the main business. When university libraries in China and abroad build their collections they usually do not go to publishers; they go to bookstores that work with many publishers and know how to choose titles, a trade known as library supply. The Ministry of Education sets how many volumes a Chinese university must hold per student, and after universities expanded enrollment in 1999 the required collections swelled into a fat market. At Guolinfeng and Fengrusong, where Deng Yuhong once worked, this was the main business, she says, while "retail has always been hard to make money on." Every bookstore fought for a contract with a university library, and that inevitably involved no small amount of favor-trading and deals no one talks about.

A better-known model today is the one Eslite or Fangsuo Commune uses. They open inside shopping malls and get cheaper rent because commercial landlords want a mix of tenants. Books take up about a third of the floor; the profit comes mainly from coffee and design goods. In past interviews Fangsuo's founder, Mao Jihong, has called the shift "a revival of China's cultural industry."

Either way, the people who run bookstores are no longer only cultured people in the old sense; they have to be sharp businesspeople as well. Sisyphe, an independent bookstore that started in Guizhou in 1993, resembles Fengrusong in that respect: it was founded by Xue Ye, who had the top score in Guizhou's liberal arts track on the 1988 college entrance exam. As one member of the "Sisyphe Book Friends" group on Douban remembers it, it began as a small shop on Biyun Road in the old town of Zunyi, its front barely 4 meters wide. Last year Sisyphe opened 31 branches across the country; this year it plans another 42, for a total of 112.

On January 13 we met Sisyphe's chairman, Jin Weizhu, at a press event at the chain's Solana store in Beijing, and he put it plainly: "A bookstore is no different from any other retail business. If you want to make it big and make money, you have to standardize it the way retail does. Our pace now isn't fast at all — I could open 80 stores a year if I wanted. Everyone else in China is doing culture. We're doing business."

Deng Yuhong cannot accept this. To run a bookstore whose main business is not books is, first of all, to cheat readers. "A bookstore with a café, with all kinds of talks and events, with lending, with film screenings — wonderful, of course. But take away the café, stop the events, stop the lending, stop the screenings, and nobody comes anymore: do you still have the nerve to call yourself a bookstore? A bookstore has to carry a bookstore's responsibility, and a bookstore has its dignity too. I will never call a shop that treats books as decoration a bookstore."

She resists library supply and the rest of the trade's inner workings just as firmly: "I don't want to curry favor with anyone. I opened a bookstore because I love it. If I had to do things I don't love, how would I keep going?"

If it weren't for promoting the store, she would not bother with a shop on Taobao or the secondhand-book site Kongfuzi, let alone Weibo or WeChat. Readers become unbearable to her the moment they are online: some leave a middling rating because a book wasn't what they expected; some chat for half an hour and buy nothing. As for Weibo and WeChat — "I don't really understand why so many people want to use them. What's on there reads like nonsense, and you can hardly tell what's true. In any case, I rarely write what I really think in a public space like that."

Deng Yuhong and Qing Song still use the Xiaolingtong handsets that were common in the early 2000s. Six or seven old ones, all used at some point, are stuffed in the corner of a drawer, a record of one bookstore's unchanging way of communicating through a changing era. To accommodate young customers who pay with Alipay and WeChat, Deng Yuhong finally bought a 400-yuan Redmi.

Outside their 12-and-a-half-hour workdays they don't follow the news online either. On March 11, The 1970s — edited by Bei Dao, published by People's Literature Publishing House — and Bei Dao's own The Book of Failure were selling well off the new-releases table, but Deng Yuhong and Qing Song had no idea that four days earlier the first column on Douban Time, "Waking Up: A Poetry Class With Bei Dao and Friends," had gone live and set off a wave of discussion. When they heard, they didn't think it had much to do with sales: "Bei Dao has always sold well. So have Gu Cheng and Hai Zi."

4

Douban Bookstore now takes in only 30,000 yuan a month. It has always been a small shop, never with enough weight to get publishers to sell to it on account — settling every quarter or half-year, with unsold books returnable. Reselling discounted books is its main source of profit, and against e-commerce that has become less and less reliable.

To subsidize the store, Qing Song started a design studio in 2009 with the painter Zhao Lu and Wu Sijing, a clerk who had studied graphic design. They called it Light in August, after Faulkner's novel, and designed notebooks, postcards and other "book-related" goods — they were particular about that phrase — while taking book-design jobs from publishers.

Zhao Lu was about Qing Song's age and at the time a painter down on her luck, never sure where the next meal was coming from. They met when she bought books at the store: he recommended books to her, she talked to him about art. The studio was born there — one who could paint, one who knew publishing; no better pairing existed. Light in August put out a notebook series called Seven Deadly Sins that sold out quickly. Zhao Lu spent every meal dreaming aloud about the studio's future, and designed a full set of logos for the bookstore.

Light in August could not last. The next year Zhao Lu signed with a good gallery, Shangshe Space, and on her talent and the gallery's connections became well known; a single painting could fetch more than a million yuan, priced by the square centimeter. Wu Sijing went to work as a designer at Sculpting in Time. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, published by CITIC Press, was the only thing she and Qing Song ever finished together.

His partners were gone, but Qing Song felt the orders Light in August had already taken had to be finished. More than 100 had piled up over time; he taught himself the work and kept going, and the bookstore was left entirely to Deng Yuhong to manage. A year later he developed an anxiety disorder. "One day a friend said to me, hurry up and design a cover for me today, it goes to the printer tomorrow. That was the last straw." There was one upside for the couple: their families stopped pressing them to come home and have a baby.

Light in August died there. Qing Song says the work left him injured. Now he spends his days straightening books again. Free time is precious, but on the rare half-day off the two of them lie in bed, not knowing what to do with it.

Most of the time Deng Yuhong is still cheerful. She answers customers' questions online without tiring of them, packs the orders, keeps smiling at old customers and new ones in the shop. The worry surfaces only now and then, in her Douban journal: "In an age when books are no longer quite books, is it suicide to go on selling books as books and running a bookstore as a bookstore?"

5

Against shifting policy, Douban Bookstore is more helpless still.

On May 2, 2014, CCTV's Channel 13 ran an episode called "Live to Old Age, Read to Old Age!". In it the 24-hour Sanlian Taofen Bookstore on Meishuguan East Street stood as the model state-owned bookstore, and Douban Bookstore served as the lead-in to state policy tilting toward private ones. After an interview clip with Douban Bookstore, the host explained the change in the government's subsidy policy at the time: "In 2014 the pilot program supporting brick-and-mortar bookstores expanded from 12 cities to 12 provinces, including Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Physical bookstores that have already received subsidy money may apply again, with small and micro enterprises and private cultural businesses as the priority."

Deng Yuhong was delighted to hear it, naturally. Qing Song filled out an application from what he could find, and soon discovered the road went nowhere.

"The application asked me to attach photographs of cultural lectures held inside the store. But our store is so small there's no way to hold events. I called to ask what to do. Guess what they told me? Figure it out yourself," Qing Song said, with a look somewhere between laughing and crying. It was the only moment in all our conversations when he showed any heat.

The last subsidy list published on the official website went largely to the Xinhua Bookstore system. The Sanlian Taofen 24-hour bookstore, meanwhile, received 8 million yuan in state funds in 2015.

Beijing's new round of planning changes didn't leave Deng Yuhong much time to think about the question, either.

The notice the Zhongke Keyi tenants received, "Notice on Cooperating with the Special Campaign to Rectify Walls Broken Open for Storefronts," goes back to early November 2015. No document spells out the legal basis, the scope or the specifics of the campaign; they set out only the harms of knocking holes in walls to turn housing into shops — damage to the environment, damage to a building's structure, danger to other people.

On November 27, 2015, more than 30 illegally built shopfronts cut into walls along the east end of Nanlishi Road in Beijing's Xicheng district were demolished jointly by the chengguan, the Administration for Industry and Commerce and the Yuetan Subdistrict Office. Then, in March 2016, a document called "Several Opinions on Further Strengthening Urban Planning, Construction and Management" was issued, and Sanlihe became the first pilot project Beijing announced under it.

On February 23 this year another document appeared: the "Beijing 2017 Work Plan for the Relieve, Rectify and Upgrade Special Campaign." At a municipal meeting on industry, commerce and food and drug regulation, Deputy Mayor Cheng Hong broke the numbers down further: more than 5,000 households in Fengtai, 3,341 in Haidian, more than 3,000 in Xicheng, more than 2,300 in Dongcheng, more than 1,800 in Chaoyang. The figures also arrived as a news text message on the phone of Zhang Wei, one of the Zhongke Keyi tenants and the owner of Today Appliances.

In our reporting the same kind of news kept coming from different people: the row of shopfronts outside the University of International Business and Economics was gone; the supermarket at the Baoshengli market was gone; the noodle shop on Zhaodengyu Road in Xisi had disappeared; the front entrance of the Hidden House bar, at the corner of Xindong Road in Sanlitun and the Beisanli neighborhood, had been sealed, making it a genuinely hidden house.

A staff member at the Zhongguancun Subdistrict Office explained by phone to QDaily: "There are 32 residents' committees under the Zhongguancun subdistrict. The procedure is that the committees investigate and report up; which original state a building gets restored to is also based on the drawings the committees provide. Last year's document wasn't written very clearly, so the work was mainly about relieving congestion: clearing out dirt and disorder and unlicensed businesses, taking down walls and sealing shops. This year's document is more detailed. Some shops whose floor space doesn't meet the standard have to be cleared, and some buildings have to be restored to their original state. The plan for Zhongguancun subdistrict this year is to clear more than 300 households, and 200 next year."

We reached two staff members at Zhongke Keyi, one in the engineering department and one in leasing. Neither knew who was handling communication with the Zhongguancun subdistrict, and neither could say which period's appearance the building's ground-floor shops were supposed to be restored to. "I remember the ground floor was already being rented out in the 1980s," one of them said.

Deng Yuhong and Qing Song know none of this. Qing Song asks the property management for news every day, and the answer is always "still talking." But a reporter from Legal Daily, after making inquiries, told Deng Yuhong: "This one is a hard rule. There may not be much room to negotiate."

6

Wan Ting, just turned 22, began working part time at Douban Bookstore six months ago, minding the shop from 6 to 9 in the evening. Her full-time job is as a cleaner at Tsinghua University's logistics management center. She is up at 5 every morning, cleans the university leaders' offices in two rounds at 8 and 11, rests for a while in the afternoon and then goes to the bookstore. With the part-time work she takes home just over 3,700 yuan a month.

On the night of February 23, the day the sealing notice arrived, Deng Yuhong posted about it in her Douban journal. Wan Ting remembers that for the next two days the bookstore was packed. Media outlets called one after another asking for interviews. Zhuang Songlie, who owns Sculpting in Time Café, came by to invite Deng Yuhong and Qing Song to open inside his café; a crowdfunding fund manager named Liu called to ask whether they needed money. A film crew turned up as well, saying they were scouting locations for a movie starring Lu Han and Zhou Dongyu and wanted to shoot in the store.

But most of the visitors were ordinary readers. They asked Deng Yuhong and Qing Song how things were going, took a few photographs, and bought a few books or postcards to show support or to keep.

Kong Lili, a Peking University graduate who now produces documentaries, had just finished a film about 60 years of Xinhua Bookstore's rises and falls. She had heard nothing about the notice; she had simply arranged to meet a few classmates at Douban Bookstore on March 6. One of them, a girl with a Taiwanese accent, said with regret, "The books here are cheap, there are plenty of editions you can't find elsewhere, and you can recommend books you love to friends. This is a place with shared memories." The girl bought six or seven books, among them The Gospel of Animals, A Book of Nonsense Verse and All Creatures Great and Small.

Kong Lili, thinking of the documentary she had just finished, felt a pang. "Xinhua Bookstore's appearance has changed beyond recognition. But the hardware is the easy part to change. The software is the hard part."

No one was surprised by the sealing, or by a closure. A reader told Qing Song that Chenguang, the bookstore across the road, was also pulling out. We crossed together and climbed the stairs to look. One clerk was inside. It was a warm, well-lit bookstore next to a café, 120 square meters, selling religious books, crucifix ornaments and paintings of the Virgin, with a big storeroom at the back. Rent was only 6 yuan a square meter.

"Why are you moving out?"

"We're losing money. Some books can still be published but aren't allowed to be sold anymore. Bookstores moving around is ordinary."

Qing Song did not disagree. He was tempted by the space about to come free, though a little worried that sharing a lease with the café next door would be unstable. The day before, he had gone to look at a unit in Huaxing Jiayuan — also 6 yuan per square meter a day, but on the 11th floor and impossible to register as a business, which meant he could not issue invoices to customers.

By the time we walked back to the store the clock read 9:18, and one or two customers were still turning pages. Qing Song picked up an iron rod with a hook at one end, stepped outside, gave two small jumps and pulled down the roller shutter over the window.

Ten years on, this is the gesture that ends his day — though before long he may have to change it.

(Wan Ting is a pseudonym used in this article.)

Photographs taken on site by the reporter.