Shanghai Library

The Shanghai Library is the second largest library in China, second only to the Beijing National Library. It is located on an area of 3.1 hectares, in a building 106 meters high, with 24 floors. This is the highest library building in the world, resembling a giant lighthouse in its shape and is of interest to connoisseurs of architecture.

The very first library in Shanghai was built in 1847 by Europeans and was named after the Jesuit mission Xu Jiahui. In 1925, the Chinese opened their own library called the Shanghai Oriental Library. The original collection of books was small, but in 1950 a book-collection campaign was launched, involving many Shanghai residents as well as prominent Chinese scholars. As a result, in just a year activists were able to collect more than two hundred thousand books.

In 1995, the Shanghai Library merged with the Shanghai Institute of Scientific and Technical Information and became a modern research center combining public resources and the latest information technologies.