In 1932, Zheng Zhenduo lost roughly 20,000 volumes of books.

Japanese troops had stormed into Shanghai, broken into his home, and scattered the collection the literary historian and editor had spent years amassing. Just five years later, Japanese troops returned, and Zheng watched as the Kaiming bookshop, where more than 10,000 of his volumes were stored, was engulfed in flames.

“All day and night the northeast corner blazed,” he later wrote in an essay. “Charred scraps of paper filled the sky like black butterflies. Dozens, hundreds, drifted into my courtyard. I picked them up. They were still warm, with faint traces of characters. These were the writings of our ancestors.”

Scenes of destruction like this were all too common during Japan’s invasion of China, a chapter of World War II history that often gets glossed over in global narratives. As it stands, when Japan fully invaded China from 1937 to 1945, tens of millions of Chinese people died amid the bombs, massacres, and famine.

Almost forgotten is the parallel catastrophe that befell China’s books, which saw 90 million volumes in the library system alone destroyed by the end of 1937 — less than half a year into Japan’s full invasion, according to 1938 statistics. Countless more were lost in private collections as once-famous family libraries were dismantled and rare works were burned, stolen, or sold to dealers in cities like Suzhou and Huzhou.

Enter private collectors and intellectuals like Zheng, who went from a prewar collector to a member of the underground resistance. Galvanized to keep China’s past from being scattered to the winds — or destroyed altogether — he faced near-insurmountable, harrowing odds.

“Houses, jewels, factories, all these can be destroyed and later compensated,” he wrote after the war. “But cultural artifacts, once lost, are like lives extinguished. They will never return.”

The war for books

Zheng was spurred into action by a fear that war would bring yet another shu’e, or “calamity of books,” to Chinese history, which could see the permanent loss of precious tomes. After all, books represented cultural identity, history, and legacy.

The Japanese army also understood the importance of books. Each military division included specialists tasked with identifying, cataloguing, and seizing valuable works — particularly difangzhi, or local records that catalogued a region’s population, resources, and economy.

For Zheng, it was clear that these books were not just historical documents, but tools for colonial administration, even military campaigns. He had to keep them out of the invading army’s shelves if China was to survive.

And so, throughout the war, Zheng dealt discreetly with regional booksellers, private libraries, and middlemen, purchasing volumes for the Chinese government, which by this point had relocated to the southwestern city of Chongqing.

The wartime market was a battlefield of its own. Once Shanghai’s neighboring city of Suzhou fell, precious volumes hit the market at the desperate price of a liter of rice per book. Zheng knew that winning a rare text required more than money; it required trust. And so he maintained business with dealers and middlemen to gain an edge over the competition, which included booksellers from Beiping — today’s Beijing — backed by Japan or American research institutes. Zheng also made sure to purchase even from shipments containing little of value, just to keep relationships afloat and ensure access when something truly rare surfaced.

To some of his peers, the effort was misguided. “When refugees are drifting and the battlefield lies in ruins, what reason is there to spend money saving antiques?” Zheng’s friend Ye Shengtao wrote. In fact, many intellectuals fled inland with universities and ministries and urged Zheng to do the same.

Yet Zheng remained in Shanghai. To some, he was being submissive under occupation. To Zheng, preserving the written word was its own kind of resistance.

A fellowship of preservation

In 1940, Zheng finally gained allies.

Roughly 1.5 million yuan (approximately $102,000 at the time) from a fund jointly managed by China and the UK, originally allocated to build the National Library in Nanjing, was instead redirected to buy books in the years following Nanjing’s fall. Suddenly, Zheng had a substantial budget — and a team.

This gave birth to the Rare Book Preservation Society that year. Within two years, they purchased roughly 60,000 volumes of rare works — including the much-sought-after Jiayetang collection of Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) history books. This rivaled the holdings of the Beiping Library, which had been building its collection for decades.

Their influence was tangible. In 1940, the Society acquired more than 600 maps from a private collector. A year later, those maps were shipped to Chongqing on urgent demand, recognized for their intelligence value. That same year, a small collection of books deemed national treasures reached Chongqing for exhibition, drawing enormous attention.

Yet secrecy was essential. The Society communicated via code to dodge Japanese surveillance. Meanwhile, Zheng directed the clandestine press, Fushe, which in 1938 produced the first full Chinese translation of Edgar Snow’s “Red Star Over China,” a work deemed “top secret” by the Japanese army, who never knew that Zheng was behind it.

Zheng’s safety depended not only on secrecy but also on trust. Years of fair dealing had earned him the loyalty of his partners at the Shanghai China Bookstore, who carefully distanced Zheng from Japanese visitors intent on meeting him. When Japanese investigators purchased one of his books, they received a copy without Zheng’s afterword, where he wrote about “driving out the Japanese invaders.”

Then, on Sept. 27, 1940, Japan signed a military alliance with Germany and Italy, meaning that foreign concessions in Shanghai could fall into Japanese hands at any moment. The Society began to seek ways to transfer its collections.

Only a small number of books could be flown to the wartime capital of Chongqing via Hong Kong, while large quantities had to go by land and sea, through Hong Kong and modern-day Myanmar. Yet the land route would prove untenable once the Japanese army occupied Saigon — today’s Ho Chi Minh City — in July 1941. As a last resort, the books were to be shipped via Hong Kong to the Library of Congress in the United States for temporary storage. The employees of the Shanghai China Bookstore were entrusted with packing and mailing more than 2,700 parcels within two months without arousing Japanese suspicion.

By October 1941, more than 30,000 volumes had reached Hong Kong. Zheng urged the Chongqing government to quickly send the books on to the United States before it was too late, but bureaucracy delayed matters. Official representatives flew to Hong Kong to stamp each book and confirm ownership, which took more than a month. Then the shipment, which was scheduled for Nov. 28, was postponed to Dec. 6.

On that day, the President Grant passenger liner did not have room for the 111 crates, and they were returned to the University of Hong Kong’s Fung Ping Shan Library to await the next ship.

The next day, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Hours later, Japanese troops invaded Hong Kong. On Dec. 28, military police raided the Fung Ping Shan Library and discovered the books.

Loss and return

The disappearance of those 30,000 volumes — particularly the Jiayetang collection — haunted Zheng until Japan’s surrender. “Could it be that everything we had painstakingly gathered over two years was destroyed in an instant? That all our toil in collecting, searching, and rescuing these works ended merely in gathering them together to make it easier for the enemy to loot and burn?” he wrote in 1945.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan began to assume full control of Shanghai. Mass persecution of intellectuals began with the Dec. 15 arrest of Xu Guangping, who, as the wife of prominent author Lu Xun, was very well-connected. Another arrested intellectual, the writer Li Jianwu, recalled his interrogator, the former monk Hagiwara Taikyoku: “He regarded this profession as a kind of pleasant duty. He never sighed, he never complained. When parting, he told me calmly that Hitler had died by suicide.”

Neither Xu nor Li revealed Zheng’s whereabouts.

The day after Xu’s arrest, Zheng left his family, changed his name, and lived incognito for more than three years. He exchanged his Western suit for a Chinese gown and walked with a leather briefcase. For all intents and purposes, he was just going off to work every day. In fact, Zheng was still moving among bookshops, quietly collecting and safeguarding written works.

Other than the more than 30,000 volumes lost in Hong Kong, the Society had another 30,000 hidden — and moved between — private homes and temples across Shanghai. In 1942, when the regime threatened house-to-house searches for books and newspapers, many Shanghai citizens burned anything that might bring them trouble. Zheng himself was also forced to burn letters and newspapers to protect the secret of the books.

Meanwhile, in Tokyo, the 111 looted crates of ancient Chinese works were stored in the Imperial Library, and the scholar Nagasawa Kikuya was tasked with cataloguing them. At first, it was routine; then, realizing their importance, Nagasawa stretched the work out for years. Even as Japan neared defeat in 1945, the job was unfinished. According to his colleague, Nagasawa remarked: “As soon as the occupation troops arrive, they’ll take the books away! Just as we once did in China.”

To avoid handing them over, in August 1945, 20,000 volumes were moved from Tokyo to Kanagawa Prefecture for storage, while just over 10,000 remained in the basement of the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum.

Those remaining volumes left a trace. In 1946, the British officer Charles Ralph Boxer, who was captured during the fall of Hong Kong, managed to retrieve his own books that had been seized, and discovered “Chinese government books” in the same Tokyo location. He alerted the Chinese delegation.

After years of basement storage, these books suffered severe damage from long exposure. Yet the books were returned. By February 1947, there were 34,970 volumes shipped to China. Today, those wartime acquisitions that Zheng had painstakingly collected are preserved in libraries in Beijing, Nanjing, and Taipei.

Zheng himself would not see the full results of his effort. In 1958, he died in a plane crash while on a cultural exchange mission abroad. His family later donated his personal collection to the Beijing Library.

Building a public library had long been Zheng’s dream. In one of his novels, a scholar laments: “Such a vast Shanghai, and no public library! Only private collections, closed to all but close friends. One cannot even enter to read, much less borrow. The poor have no books to read, and to become learned is as hard as climbing to heaven.”

Through years of wartime efforts, Zheng at last fulfilled that dream — not by restoring a single private library, but by helping to build a library for the entire nation.

This article is based on the author’s book, Secret Struggle: A Scholar’s Cultural War of Resistance. SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2025.

Portrait artist: Wang Zhenhao.

(Header image: Visuals from Wu Zhen, VCG, and the public domain, reedited by Sixth Tone)