Shanghai Daily news

The heads of two generations of a local family collected and preserved part of China's precious literary heritage in their city garden villa, writes Michelle Qiao.
The white house at 666 Changle Road is now a dental hospital, but in the years before it echoed to the sound of drilling and filling it was a place for the silent contemplation of precious books.
The sound of grinding teeth and the smell of medical alcohol fill the four-story building today which is set back behind a small yard planted with pine trees facing bustling Changle Road. The interior has been disfigured with all the windows, doors and staircases painted with a poor-quality chestnut-hued lacquer. The wooden floor has been replaced by cheap material and a modern-style, worn, grayish carpet covers the staircase.
Between the two world wars, the house used to be filled with the smell of precious books and it had the elegant name of "Bao Li Tang" (Precious Polite House).
The first owner was a Cantonese man named Pan Mingxun who came to Shanghai in 1919 to study business. He worked for foreign-owned banks, became a comprador because of his fluent English and later had a senior position on the Shanghai Municipal Council in the former International Settlement.
Pan had a refined hobby - he collected ancient books, especially precious volumes from the Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) dynasties.
In 1930, Yuan Kewen, the second son of the former Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) minister and later dictator Yuan Shih-kai, sold a rare book of the Song Dynasty entitled "Li Ji Zheng Yi" to Pan for an amazing price. The book used to belong to a family descended from the sage Confucius.
After Pan died in 1939, his son Pan Shizi inherited the house. Afraid of losing the precious book collections during the anti-Japanese war (1937-45), the young Pan had the books stored in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in Hong Kong.
"The second floor used to house a grand library with beautiful teakwood furniture and many comfortable yellow leather sofas," recalls Jin Heping, vice president of the dental hospital who had worked and lived in the building as a nurse 30 years ago. "There used to be a grand platform on the third floor which has been converted into a room today. In my memory, I can see doors of teakwood dotted with exquisite carvings."
The house stood in a spacious garden and Jin recalls that an old man named Lu Naiqiang who visited the house last year said he had lived in the house from 1937 to 1940.
"Forgetting the exact number of the old house, he sent his son to take pictures of every garden villa on Changle Road. From them he was able to recognize this building," says Jin.
"Next, he came down from Hubei Province with his wife to see the house. He told me that there used to be another similar house connected to this house by a pleasant corridor. The two houses were built for two brothers. The old man said the house had been taken over by a family named Chen who lived on the second floor. He lived at the third floor and he said he often saw a young woman reading English aloud on the grand platform."
After 1949, a hospital for post office staff traded four apartments for the house and the Chen family moved out. In 1990, the house became a dental hospital.
But to go back to the books. Pan refused offers to buy the rare books from many keen bibliophiles and paid a great deal in rent to keep the books stored in the bank. In 1951, when living in Hong Kong, Pan began corresponding with Zheng Zhenduo, then head of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, and he donated the 104 Song-Dynasty books and seven Yuan-Dynasty books to the Beijing Library. He later returned to Shanghai to live on the first floor of a garden villa on Hunan Road. In 1952, he became head of the library and a professor at the local Fudan University.
He was imprisoned for seven years during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and was assigned to work in a printing factory. His wife and children were forced to leave the villa and share a house with several families. After the "cultural revolution," his son went to America to study and his wife followed. But Pan chose to stay in Shanghai alone.
"He was an interesting man and often whistled during his work in the printing factory," recalls Jia Zhifang, a professor at Fudan University. "He was rich and 'Westernized.' He often took fried steak, yogurt and bread with jam and cheese as lunch to the factory, which was rare at that time. After returning to work at Fudan in 1979, he still often brought his lunch to eat in the factory. When his grandson was born, he sent chocolates to every worker in the factory."
Pan's major work in his later years was a translation of "Sanzi Jing" ("Three Classic Characters"), a 13th-century distillation of the essentials of Confucian thought written in couplets of three characters designed to teach young children in an easy to understand way. Until the latter part of the 20th century, the work was part of a child's introduction at home to a formal education.
"His expressions and words often flash into my mind. He was a straight man, a friend to remember," says Jia.
The gentle man and guardian of literature who whistled while he worked died in Shanghai in 1992 at the age of 84.