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22
iors are finished in plain wood, painted red, or un-painted, and the columns and beams without their lacquer and plaster coating often look very thin. It is plain that they were put when there was not too much money available, probably shortly after the Taiping rebellion, when many of the temples and halls here were destroyed. I am also observing that what seemed to be remarkable in the exposing of gods in glass cases in the temple at Yu Ch'uan, is a very common thing in temples and monasteries here, where walls of main temple halls are apt to be filled in this way in much the same manner as the walls of a library are filled with books. 
We walked along the island road, and I had a desire to see the Chekiang Public Library. We were permitted to go in, and go in we did. This place has a very decent building in a rather painful rural-country-seat-modified-bourgeois-chateau style of architecture. The building was built for this purpose. In the main hall is a good light well under a sky-light, and a "grand staircase"leading to the second story. The building was started just before the end of the Manchu dynasty. In this central hall is the English catalog. They have about eight thousand English and foreign books, many of which are in a city branch. As I glanced through the cards it seemed that most of the books were of the textbook class, including many textbooks of the English language. I introduced myself as the librarian of the School of Chinese Studies, and a very pleasant young fellows took us upstairs and showed us the carefully locked rooms containing the collection of the libraries of K'ang Hsi and Ch'ien Lung. The books/are all bound between wooden cover, and kept in cases made of fragrant wood, finished and the number of the case in gilt characters. Some of the books are kept in modern cases, open, with screen doors. Chinese books need to be aired and sunned periodically. We looked at some of the printed and written books in both collections, at an old Sung dynasty book said to have been printed from iron plates, and at an old Buddhist sutra inscribed in very fine engraving on palm leaves, in what is probably Pali or some Indian script. When we came away our guide presented me with the two volumes of the complete catalog of the two important old collections.