@samuelszuchan: There's a library in rural China clad in 45,000 wooden sticks, and it's not even the strangest part of this story. Jiaojiehe is a hillside village of about sixty households in Huairou County outside Beijing. The library is called Liyuan. It's 175 square meters. The sticks are the same kind villagers use to fuel their cooking stoves. The exterior is functionally a wall of firewood. It won the inaugural Moriyama RAIC International Prize in 2014, carrying a $100,000 award. The bus route to the village had to add a stop just to handle the foot traffic. But Liyuan is not an outlier. In 2005, China launched a program called the Public Cultural Service System. Every county above 200,000 people would get a graded library, a museum, a cultural center, a stadium, and a youth activity center. The budget went from 13.382 billion yuan in 2005 to 120.289 billion yuan in 2022. An increase of roughly 899 percent over seventeen years. By the end of 2022, there were 3,303 public libraries above the county level, holding 1.36 billion volumes. By 2023, 6,833 museums. More than 90 percent of them free. Two of China's three Pritzker Prize laureates made their careers building in second- and third-tier counties. It makes you wonder: what’s stopping the West from building like this, too?

Sam Szuchan

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Saturday 30 May 2026 19:02:05 GMT