This photo taken on Nov.3, 2023 shows customers selecting traditional stationery in the Yau Ma Tei branch of Hong Kong Chung Hwa Book Company in Hong Kong, south China. (Xinhua/Wang Shen)

Every Wednesday or Friday morning, people from different parts of Hong Kong gather in front of a bookstore in Yau Ma Tei in south Kowloon Peninsula, waiting for its opening.

As soon as the gate opens at 11:00 a.m., they will rush in to see the new arrivals of books. Once a week, various types of new books published in the Chinese mainland hit the shelves in the Yau Ma Tei branch of Hong Kong Chung Hwa Book Company.

Throughout its history of over 100 years, the time-honored brand Chung Hwa has always held the principle of promoting Chinese culture via publishing and selling books. The Yau Ma Tei branch, established in 1979 as a flagship store, best embodies that principle.

The top floor of the three-storey store is designed in a classical Chinese style. Dozens of wooden shelves are full of books, most of which are about Chinese culture, and interspersed with different sorts of traditional stationery, such as Chinese writing brushes, inks, Xuan paper, inkstones, etc.

"There are more than 8,000 types of China-themed books," says Chu Chi-kwan, the store manager. He walks from shelf to shelf and introduces the extensive range of books, including literature, history, philosophy, classical Chinese art and traditional Chinese medicine.

The rich collection appeals to many Hong Kong people, who make the store their first choice when seeking books about Chinese culture. Even if the books pursued are not available in the store, Chu can help the customers place an order from the Chinese mainland as soon as possible.

Among the frequenters are some cultural figures. Lee Chack-fan, a professor at Hong Kong University, recalls visiting the store nearly every week in the 1990s and sometimes even hunting out some favorite items for Jao Tsung-I, a world-renowned Hong Kong scholar of traditional Chinese culture.

A number of overseas Chinese also make special trips here on a regular yearly basis, Chu says. "Our store's influence goes beyond the neighboring community to cover Hong Kong and even the whole Asia."

Founded in 1912 in Shanghai by Lufei Kui, an educator and publisher, the publishing agency boasts the gene to enlighten people with the essence of Chinese culture. It is exemplified by its first publication - a series of textbooks which were also the first ones of the kind after the end of more than 2,000 years of feudal rule in China.

In Hong Kong, an affiliated agency of Chung Hwa was set up in 1927, and then became the core base of the company after Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army in the World War II. Books printed by Chung Hwa in Hong Kong were shipped to the unoccupied areas in the Chinese mainland, contributing to China's educational and cultural endeavor during wartime.

After the war, Chung Hwa continued to flourish in Hong Kong.

"Many people in Hong Kong admit that they have been reading Chung Hwa's books while growing up," says Lai Yiu-keung, the deputy editor-in-chief of Hong Kong Chung Hwa.

Lai, also a book lover in his fifties, recalls that almost every Hong Konger of his generation owns a dictionary published by Hong Kong Chung Hwa.

According to the incomplete statistics collected by Chan Zaak-lam, a researcher of Hong Kong history, from the 1950s to 1970s, Hong Kong Chung Hwa released around 850 types of books, of which more than one-third were about Chinese civilization.

In 1988, Hong Kong Chung Hwa re-registered independently and integrated with several other publishing institutions to form Sino United Publishing. Since then, the old brand has been promoting Chinese culture to more readers through innovation.

During the five years since 2012, Lai and his colleagues invited scholars home and abroad to write introductions and annotations for 50 selected Chinese classical works, including "The Analects of Confucius" and "The Classic of Mountains and Seas."

"We would like to make full use of Hong Kong's close ties with both the Chinese mainland and the rest of the world and dig out the contemporary value of ancient Chinese civilization," Lai says.

In recent years, Hong Kong Chung Hwa has expanded its business beyond publication to attract a younger reader group, including holding lectures for authors to communicate directly with their readers. Most of the time, the venue is the Yau Ma Tei store, where the decoration and vast sea of books offer an immersive atmosphere for the participants to learn more about Chinese culture.

Lai, who first came to the store as a teenager decades ago, is now happy to return here as a lecture organizer to offer a platform for direct communication between the authors and their readers. 

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