The library of the mountain village of Beichuan, which was destroyed in an earthquake, will receive 120,000 euros from a Dutch foundation to store what it has been able to save from under the rubble.

A report by Marije Vlaskamp

This is the first time the Prince Claus Fund has earmarked such a large amount for cultural emergency aid, and it’s also the first time the Fund has undertaken a project in China. "The library director mailed us a budget from her hospital bed".

Director Li Chun intended to move part of the collection from the overfull library in the centre of Beichuan to a modern annex in an outlying neighbourhood at the foot of the mountain. She was as the printers next door to the library to pick up some blueprints for the annex.

Primeval force
Then the mountain came crashing down on the town of 160,000 residents. An earthquake registering eight on the Richter scale scattered tonnes of earth and rocks the size of lorries.

 
"My head was bleeding and my hand was trapped under the rubble. I heard someone next to me call out in the dark. It was the girl from the print shop. The printer was also lying there somewhere. Dead."

 
Li Chun lay buried under 20 meters of rubble. It was only after being saved that she learned she had been buried alive for 75 hours. The printer’s girl had been dug out earlier. I don’t know whether she survived. I never saw her again."

 
After being admitted to hospital, Li Chun realised she easily could have died. The combination of gangrene, the amputation of her left buttock and a psychological trauma meant it took her more than a year to recover. But an irrepressible urge to save whatever was left of her library, which had in its collection irreplaceable books and CDs on Beichuan, inspired her to cling to life.

 
Ethnic minority
Beichuan is home to the Qiang, a small ethnic minority. They are a mountain people with their own language and traditions, which are passed on orally. They don’t have their own script, and over the past few centuries most of the Qiang have adopted the Chinese language and customs. Only one in three Qiang still speak their own language.

 
To preserve the last remnants of their unique culture, Li Chun - a Han Chinese married to a Qiang man – began collecting material on the Qiang and their native land. Embroidery patterns, songs, funeral rites; she had videos made of whatever was not written down.

 
Documentation project
A fraction of the Qiang collection was saved. The rest is slowly disintegrating under the rubble, which is why she began mobilising her network from her hospital bed only three months after the earthquake struck, looking for support to properly preserve the remains of the Qiang collection. "As soon as the new Beichuan is finished in 2020, we will get back to work and resume the documentation project."

 
"The people in the disaster area have tremendous resilience. They are working hard and organise all kinds of help," says Eleonore de Merode, project coordinator of the Prince Claus Fund’s Cultural Emergency Response department (CER), which offers financial assistance when cultural heritage is at risk of being lost as the result of war or a natural disaster.
 
 
Hard hit
This is not the first time the Fund has assisted a library after a disaster. Earlier beneficiaries include an Indonesian library which received assistance after the 2004 tsunami, as well as archives in Lesotho and Lebanon. The donation to Beichuan is the largest in the Fund’s history, but then the Qiang have been exceptionally hard hit by the earthquake.

At 300,000 souls, the Qiang were never a numerous people, and one in ten were killed in the earthquake. Without its 'initiated', the elderly people who still know and practice the old traditions and customs, it will be next to impossible to document the Qiang rituals. However, Li Chun, who has learned to consider every day a gift, will not be deterred.