Keeping a ‘diary’ of China
Newspaper collector finds value in old publications that record the country’s past
For over half a century, 77-yearold Liu Yuzhi from Guiyang, Guizhou province, has been collecting newspapers of all kinds from all over the country. To date, he has a collection of more than 500,000 pieces in his self-built libraries.
Liu, a former clerk at the Guiyang Municipal Bureau of Grain, collected a wide range of “precious” newspapers such as the Xuantong Time Gazette of the Qing Dynasty (16441911), and the first and final issues of different newspapers from the last century.
Other interesting pieces from his collection include commemorative publications named after the Chinese zodiac, a People’s Daily edition printed on silk material, and news pages printed on an umbrella.
“For me, a newspaper is an encyclopedia containing various content,” Liu said. “It is news at present and will be history in the future. We can read about life and learn lots of knowledge from it.”
As Liu had only three years of primary school education, he experienced difficulties writing articles at work.
“It was urgent for me to learn how to write and I started to read the local newspaper and I kept copies afterward. I wrote useful sentences down from the paper and learned them by heart every day.
“When I encountered an article that I was interested in, I would cut out the article and paste it into a notebook,” Liu said.
In 1964, Liu decided to develop his hobby into a serious “career” when a colleague told him that the first issue copy of Guizhou Daily he bought from a flea market was of high value.
Since then, he continuously collected newspapers mainly from three sources: subscriptions, antique markets, and recycling stations.
For many years, his wife Jiang Xuemei was not able to understand his “career” and complained a lot. “To collect newspapers, he went through waste and rubbish nearly every day,” Jiang said. “I only saw him at night. My friends made fun of me marrying a garbage collector.
Their family of five then lived in a house of just 46 square meters. However, “he removed the sofa and beds to fill our home with newspapers”, Jiang said. “Our children and guests did not even have a place to sleep.”
Those were not the only sacrifices that Liu made for his “career”. In the 1990s, he discovered a volume of Ta Kung Pao between 1917 and 1927 at a recycling station in Guiyang. He recognized it as a precious find, and took out all his savings and borrowed some money from relatives to purchase it for around 5,000 yuan.
In 2004, he traveled for about 30 hours by train to Beijing. After a day’s hunt at the Panjiayuan antique market, he found the Xuantong Time Gazette from the Qing Dynasty.
As his newspaper collection grew, Liu bought 4 hectares of land and built three libraries in 2007. The project finished at a cost of more than 1 million yuan in 2012. Since they opened, about 8,000 people including some expats have visited his libraries for free.
Though Jiang felt embarrassed about his hobby, she still supported his “career” for the family’s sake. However, she now understands him.
“There was an old man who recently visited our library a couple of times, and I saw him burst into tears while reading the old newspapers,” Jiang said. “He said it reminded him of his youth during the ‘cultural revolution’ (1966-76).
“People cannot live without memories, and these can’t exist without these old articles.”
Every day, Liu will take at least six hours to read newspapers. For the rest of the day, he sorts out his collections with his wife, gives tours to scholars and artists, and follows up on leads about old newspapers through his nationwide online group.
During the last 15 years, Liu has held a couple of themed exhibitions.
In 2003, he held his first newspaper exhibition at the Guizhou Museum in Guiyang to celebrate the 110th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth.
In 2005, he commemorated the 60th anniversary of the victory of War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) at the local police academy by displaying his newspapers. Since then, he has held several exhibitions every year in the city.
In October, he plans to gather and display all the reports about the liberation of cities by provincial capitals to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China in Guiyang.
Liu has a daughter and two sons, and he hopes that his daughter, a 51-year-old teacher, can succeed him. “These paper publications are the diary of our country,” he said. “To keep them is to record history.”