Bookstore Playground
With five floors, each the size of a city block, this is one big bookstore. I've taken a cab at the instructions of the Beijing hotel concierge who told me where I could find CDs. Still looking for the best selection and the best deals, I have a short window of two hours on my last afternoon in China.
Located a short distance west of Tiananmen Square, it has to be one of the largest bookstores in the world. And it is packed with people.
A conservative guess would put the number of people per floor at around 500. There is barely any elbow room in the rows and rows of stacks. The escalators are perpetually full with lines at the bottom waiting to get on, and the check out lines snake around the available space.
The set-up is reminiscent of the textbook sections of university bookstores in the states. The displays are minimal and essentially utilitarian. There is clearly no need to market these materials because they are flying off the shelves.
I already know that I'll never have enough time in this playground. The map section alone could pass an easy hour. I leave there with three 20" x 30" 3D topographical relief maps of China-one per division.
I toy with the idea of tracking down some posters, but the bulk would be prohibitive. As it is, I've decided to buy a backpack from a small luggage section of the store to manage the additional materials coming home with me. Not to mention the shipment I've already sent from the Shanghai museum-incredible prices on books for all ages about China and the language. (My favorite is a massive full color book called "Propaganda Posters from 1921-1971.")
One whole section is devoted to books on various technology applications with section headings like "C++" and "Building Web Pages" and dozens of others I'm sure our MPA tech staff would have recognized immediately. (The MPA tech crew, by the way, has been tireless in their support of this blog. It was their initiative to find and include Chinese characters to accompany the text where appropriate. Thank you Theresa and Jay!)
Leaning against the shelves, seated in the aisles, packed closely together were the hordes of eager shoppers, pouring through these hundreds of thousands of books on every subject. I did not look for nor come across titles in English, but I did buy several popular magazines in Chinese with lots of pictures for the middle and upper school-Golf (TW on the cover), Tennis (Sharapova), Soccer (Ronaldo), and fashion.
What was amazing about it all was the scale of the consumption of information. This was a Saturday afternoon, so perhaps the numbers were inflated with weekend shoppers. But this party made the Christmas rush in any US department store seem like a walk in Bamboo Park.
Amidst a sea of pedestrians back outside on the street, I hailed a cab and squeezed into the back seat with my new maps, magazines, backpack and 12 Girls Band CDs. (Another member of our group caught part of a CNN special on the 12 Girls Band the evening after my encounter with Evangeline. They are apparently heating up on the world stage. See 女子十二楽坊 or 12 Girls Band entry.)
After inching along in stop and go traffic for about 20 minutes, the driver pulled out of her lane to get a better angle and was promptly rear-ended. I waited a few minutes while she got out and angrily berated the other driver, then I got out, gave her ten yuan and caught another cab. But I didn't care. I'd found gold at the biggest bookstore in the world.