Calling himself a bookworm, Jin started his career as a rural Chinese teacher in Songjiang in 1980. Young, diligent and ambitious, he was promoted to become the school headmaster nine years later. However, still dreaming a big dream, he resigned at the age of 34 in 1995, ending his 15-year tenure as a school-based educator, and started his own businesses dedicated to spreading the influence of books.

From 1995 to 2010, he opened 21 bookstores. However, because of soaring rents, rising labor costs and the challenge of online reading, the number fell to 13 by 2012.

In one of his most difficult times, he came up with an idea to build an extraordinarily beautiful bookstore, making people love it at first sight. This time, his efforts paid off.

Stimulated by the business boom in Songjiang's Thames Town, Jin continued to open 22 additional Zhong Shu Ge, expanding to other cities, including Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province and Beijing.

According to Jin, he and his staff have been dedicated to empowering the bookstores with distinctive cultures of different cities by different decorations. Therefore, he chose an expensive but non-overlapping way to open his chain bookstores, such as a newly established one in Beijing.

"The red spiraling stairs reflect Beijing's Hutong culture," said Xiang Aiqun, the head of Beijing's Zhong Shu Ge, which officially opened on June 22in the city's northwestern Zhongguancun known as China's Silicon Valley.

With a repository of 60,000 volumes, the 660-square-meter bookstore attracted more than 84,000 visits during the first 28 days, an average about 3,100 each day.

According to Xiang, the aesthetical beauty of the architecture, which takes on a shape like a Chinese knot if viewed vertically, is just one element leading to the popularity of the bookstore. Two other reasons are the quality of the books and the profound thinking emerging from the reading experience, which are equally or even more important for establishing such bookstores.

"Our slogan is to run a book-centered bookstore," she said.

As one of the earliest civilizations in terms of the invention of movable-type printing in the 11th Century, China revered reading as a means by which people could be cultivated in the predominantly agricultural society. However, having undergone foreign incursions in the war-torn era before the founding of People's Republic of China in 1949, the destitution, disease, starvation and instability deprived many Chinese of their access to books and resulted in a poignant loss of the country's distinctive cultural identity.

After many twists and turns over the past 70 years, the Chinese government started to incorporate nationwide reading in the annual Government Work Report in 2014, considering it an important way to pass down the splendid traditional Chinese culture from one generation to another.

Leo Lee, who took his five-year-old son to Zhong Shu Ge on June 19, said: "I know learning is a lifelong process, therefore, I just want my son to foster a very good reading habit that may later help him develop his self-study capability."

Jack Ma, a pupil, who shares the same English name with China's legendary entrepreneur Ma Yun, said he loved reading science fiction novels, which currently inspire him to want to write his own sci-fi stories.

Jin says: "With its diversified and individualized services required by today's readers with broader visions, Zhong Shu Ge is not only a bookstore, but, as I expected, is also a study room enabling each visitor attempting to attain peace and aspiring to greater things to be absorbed in books." 

Zhong Shu Ge was named after Jin's daughter. He is so satisfied to see that both his daughter and the bookstores are growing well, embracing a promising future.

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