bookstores
My introduction to the Chinese classics came via a non-descript bookstore on the bank of the Xiang River.
Well, not down in the mud prone to summer flooding on the bank. On a road that ran along the river bank higher up behind the flood defenses. So quite safe.
If you crossed the Orange Island Bridge from Wuyi Dadao on the central city side, over Orange Island, to the west bank of the river, then turned right and walked a short ways northwards at the first opportunity, then about where the road turned slightly eastwards to run diagonally up to the road that runs along the riverbank is about where you'd find this bookstore. But that was a long time ago, memory is fallible, and things change, so I have no idea if I've got the location correct, nor if that little bookstore is still there. I'd love to go back though, partly just for old times' sake, partly to see what treasures it may hold now that my Chinese is good enough to read books.
Non-descript because I can't remember anything about it other than a door on the ground floor of a building leading in to a bookstore. And quite a small bookstore at that. But inside it had a few piles of Chinese classics in a series published by Hunan People's Publishing House. The books in this series all had covers in the same basic format: black with gold characters at top saying "The Chinese-English Bilingual Series of Chinese Classic", gold characters at the bottom with the names of the translators and the publishing house, a fancy gold pattern around the middle, and a red square with white characters announcing the name of the book in the middle.
Actually, the books in this series are trilingual: Classical Chinese, Modern Chinese, and English. Two translations for the price of one.
The other books in this store were out of bounds. Not for any legal reasons, but purely because I had just started learning Chinese and was nowhere near ready to be tackling books entirely in Chinese. But I could manage English translations.
I'm pretty sure I also bought a calendar at that shop as the new year approached. I'm pretty sure the calendar featured cool traditional Chinese artwork that I wasn't anywhere near close to beginning to understand, but I liked the look of. And that is how any interest starts, right? "That looks cool!" then you get stuck in to learning about it and either you learn it wasn't for you or before you've realised it you've got yourself stuck in some peculiar corner of nerd-dom, but you're quite happily enjoying yourself there. That's more or less how these things go, right?
Anyways, I did buy a few books in that series, but the one that really stood out was the Dao De Jing. Reading that in Changsha in my first year in China was quite a mind-blowing experience. The Dao De Jing opened up a radically different view of the world from the tradition I was raised in, and that was quite exciting.
There was also the Foreign Languages Bookstore, of course. I can't even remember where that was. Up Wuyi Dadao towards the railway station and then at some point turn left and head a short ways north, I think.
The Foreign Languages Bookstore was, well, it was there, it was pleasant enough, it kept me in reading material, and that's about it. It existed.
I'm sure there were plenty of other bookshops in Changsha at the time, it's just that my Chinese wasn't anywhere near good enough to make any use of them.
That little non-descript store on the west bank of the Xiang River just north of the Orange Island Bridge, though, that wee shop worked some kind of magic on me. And it was worth it.