Romance of words

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the masters featured at the ongoing Beijing exhibition. Valuable exhibits include the 1599 quarto edition of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (inset right) and Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby.[Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

Lei says the exhibition also borrows from the Jiaxing Library in Zhejiang province: the manuscripts of celebrated scholar Zhu Shenghao, who translated more than 30 of the Bard's works.

"English literature brought many new thoughts to the forerunners of modern Chinese literature," says Lu Jiande, director of the Chinese Literature Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Blackstone is impressed by Zhu's contribution during his short life, and she is even more surprised to find how Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle, is popular in China.

So manuscripts by Doyle are on show, revealing the neat and precise handwriting from which sprang his enticing novels.

So are Ian Fleming's ball-penned drafts in which James Bond was born.

The exhibition is the first project of The British Library in China, a three-year China-UK cultural exchange program.

The team is planning four more exhibitions in cities like Wuzhen, Shanghai and Hong Kong through 2019. Focusing on literature, each show will bring different exhibits.

Li Honglin, deputy director of the national library, says Chinese and British libraries' cooperation expands the tradition of China-UK culture-sharing work.

Andrews, meanwhile, notes that amid the British Library's 150-million-item collection, in addition to having every book published in the UK, newspaper, journal, magazine and website, there is a very strong historical record of Chinese material. Curators make sure they collect contemporary Chinese literature as well.

A goal of the ongoing collaboration with China, he says, is to find out more about contemporary Chinese writers.

"To be able to read them, understand them, and to be able to relate the contemporary tradition of Chinese writing to the historical ones," he says.

For his part, Lei appreciates the way the British Library, as a public library, operates professional exhibitions - and the level of digitalization of its sea of collections.

"The National Library of China is doing well in this respect, but there are inspirations we get and things we can learn from our partners," Lei says.

Blackstone says she hopes to receive more Chinese visitors to the British Library, which was once frequented by Karl Marx and Dickens.

A new Chinese-language site, www.britishlibrary.cn, has also been launched, offering high-definition pictures that allow viewers to zoom-in for details of its collections.