RAYS OF HOPE from a hidden book trove

To continue the local construction tradition, local workers were recruited to build the cob walls using local materials such as rock, soil and timber, which increased the building time to nearly three years, the longest construction period in the history of Librairie Avant-Garde.

For many visitors, Qian Xiaohua included, the Poetry Tower is stunning, the transformation allowing people to climb to the top on numerous compacted layers of fan-shaped wooden stairs that are attached to a single pillar in the middle. At the skirt of the stairs wire ropes are used to protect climbers, on which hang black and white portraits of poets such as TS Eliot, Wislawa Szymborska and Bei Dao. Climbing the stairs is akin to walking on a book of poems, the portraits of different poets suddenly popping up before your eyes as you use the staircase.

The top of the tower offers another visual feast to visitors: a bird's-eye view of the village.

Poetry is especially important for Qian and his bookshops. The flagship bookshop in Nanjing is well known for its huge collection of poetry, but Qian picked the best poetry collections and the best books of other categories for Shaxi, which filled two trucks that ran 48 hours nonstop before reaching Beilong.

"For me, this is an age of poetry because many people are lost, hoping to find a home for their souls, and that home is poetry," Qian says.

The new bookshop has more than 1,000 titles of poetry collections by poets from home and abroad, surpassing any other branches and even the flagship bookshop in Nanjing.

"In future we plan to invite poets to come here," Qian says. "We'll have poetry recitals and the picturesque landscape, and simple life here may inspire them to create poems about this place."