The history of the library

The oldest library is Tianyi Pavilion in Ningbo, Zhejiang. Tianyi Pavilion is a private library founded by Fan Qin, assistant minister of the Ministry of War in the Ming Dynasty, and it is also the oldest existing library in Asia. Because it has experienced an extremely difficult course of book collection, it has been praised as a model and cultural miracle of ancient libraries in China, thus becoming a symbol of book collection culture in China. In order to fully display the painstaking efforts of thirteen generations of scholars, local people of insight and cultural celebrities in the development history of Tianyi Pavilion, and guide people to better visit the historical time and space of Tianyi Pavilion's collection culture, Tianyi Pavilion Museum has completely transformed the original display. The new exhibition takes the development history of Tianyi Pavilion as the clue, the collection culture as the core and the collected ancient books as the main carrier. It can be divided into three stages: private collection period, social participation period and national public collection period. The architectural spaces of Tianyi Pavilion in different periods, such as Dongming Caotang, Fan's former residence, library, Zunjing Pavilion and Qianjinzhai, show the collection culture of Tianyi Pavilion in different development periods. This paper systematically and comprehensively tells the story of Tianyi Pavilion for more than 430 years, and strives to create an atmosphere full of books. The original library of Tianyi Pavilion was 70,000 volumes, but it was reduced to 6,543,800+3,000 volumes due to war and other reasons. After careful visits by cultural relics workers in Tianyige and generous donations from Ningbo bibliophiles, Fan's 4000 original collections were recovered. Together with the ancient books collected from the society, Xintianyi Pavilion now has 300,000 books. After 430 years of ups and downs, Tian Ge, the oldest existing folk library in China and one of the earliest existing folk libraries in the world, was officially opened to the public recently after renovation. The overall layout of Tian Ge Museum consists of three functional areas: library culture area, garden leisure area and exhibition area. In this transformation, Tianyi Pavilion Museum completely transformed the original exhibition. The new exhibition takes the development history of Tianyi Pavilion as the clue, the collection culture as the core, and the ancient books collected as the main carrier. It can be divided into three stages: private collection period, social participation period and national public collection period.