Under the direction of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People’s Republic of China, China-CEEC Libraries Union was established in October 2018 in Hangzhou, China, with its secretariat permanently set in Hangzhou Public Library. More than 60 libraries from China and CEEC, on a voluntary basis, seek common progress made on the principle of "equality, mutual benefit, inclusiveness and openness". 

The Very Collection in My Library aims to introduce treasures kept in each member library to audience in China and Central and Eastern European countries and bring ancient books into the limelight, through of which people could enhance their understanding of cultures and histories of other countries.

This episode here is presented by Xu Yibo, the director of Ningbo Library, introducing you the rare ancient book XiangShan County Annals (the Period of Tongzhi), the Last Volume of the total 24.

(The Very Collection in My Library is updated on Cooperation between China and CEEC official website http://www.china-ceec.org/ and CHINA CULTURE.org https://cn.chinaculture.org/.)

The annals of Xiangshan County (dated from the Tongzhi Period of Qing Dynasty), collected by the Ningbo Library, is a set of rare and precious ancient books. Its history is as follows: at the seventh year of Tongzhi Period, Mr. Huang Bingkun, the magistrate of Xiangshan County invited Mr. Ma Sicheng and other scholars to compose the annals of Xiangshan County. This set was finished the next year but was not printed. Now only two copies are available. The other volume of these two was also copied according to the one collected by our library. In this set of annals, you can find some basic information of Xiangshan County at that time, such as politics, economy and culture. This set of annals also include precious information on the local clans, scholars and military forces. It plays an important part in doing researches on Politics, Military and Society of the Qing Dynasty. A native Ningbo scholar, Mr. Zhang Meiyi, also the dean of Nanyang Mission College, contributed a preface and postscript for this set of annals. This set of annals was selected into the first group of “Catalogue of Precious ancient books of Zhejiang Province”.