Liulichang Culture Street

Liulichang Culture Street, located outside Beijing's Heping Gate, is a famous cultural street in Beijing. It is about 800 meters long from Yanshou Street in the east to Nanbei Willow Lane in Xicheng District in the west.

In the Yuan and Ming dynasties, Liuli Factory was a tile factory that fired glazed tiles for the royal family. In the early Qing Dynasty, many people from all over the country who went to Beijing for examination lived nearby and the shops provided them with books and stationery suits, so the abandoned Liuli Factory evolved into a famous cultural street.

Today's Liulichang Culture Street has become a collection place of books, calligraphy and painting, antiques and four treasures of literature from all over the world and is a must-visit place for domestic and foreign tourists to understand the culture of old Beijing.

Rongbaozhai

Rongbaozhai's predecessor "Songzhuzhai", founded in 1672, was renamed Rongbaozhai in 1894. It has two national intangible cultural heritage skills: "woodblock watermark" and "framing restoration". From the predecessor Songzhuzhai all the way to today, Rongbaozhai once had a close relationship with He Shaoji, Zeng Guofan and others. After liberation, it received the works of cultural giants such as Lu Xun and Guo Moruo, and it could also appreciate the artistic creations of Qi Baishi, Xu Beihong, Huang Binhong, Li Keran and others. Mr. Qi Gong praised Rongbaozhai as "a gathering area of calligraphy, painting, seal and carvings, where famous artists gather to talk about art".

Address: No. 19, Liulichang West Street, Hepingmenwai, Xicheng District, Beijing

Daiyuexuan

Dai Bin was born in the hometown of Hubi, Shanlian Town, Huzhou, Zhejiang. Hubi has the reputation of being the best brush. After Dai Bin left the school, he opened this brush shop under his name in 1916, adopting the business model of front shop and back factory. The raw materials were imported from Huzhou and he personally engaged in production. Daiyuexuan has been famous for a hundred years. Its brush is made with workmanship excellence and high quality. For one hundred years, this authoritarian Hubi shop did not change its location.

Address: No. 73, Liulichang East Street, Xicheng District, Beijing

China Bookstore

China Bookstore is the first state-run antique bookstore in China, established in 1952. Since then, China Bookstore has taken the excavation and protection of ancient classics as its responsibility and has become the "guardian of Beijing's traditional culture" and "Beijing's traditional culture golden business card". At the same time, the China bookstore has carried out salvage restoration of classic documents damaged and contaminated by water, fire, war and insect disasters over the past thousand years, and a large number of ancient books and documents have been well preserved. The ancient book restoration technique of the China bookstore is known as the "life-sustaining skill" of ancient historical documents, and was included in the National Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2008.

Address: No. 115-2, Liulichang East Street, Xicheng District, Beijing

Walking on Liulichang Street, the stores along the street are filled with an elegant atmosphere. Walking into a shop at random is like entering a small museum. The treasures are dizzying and give people a unique cultural experience.

Translator: BAO Minmin

Reviewer: ZHANG Ruochen