A winter's tale

It was a cold, windy day on Dec 23,2014, when the club held its inaugural meeting. Fu was nervous. She had put out a notice via her WeChat moments, but had no real idea who would show up.

"The bitter wind blew and it was very cold. I was not sure how it would turn out," she recalls. The venue, space at a teahouse, had been given for free by a friend.

And then, 16 people arrived. All from different walks of life, such as government workers, teachers and calligraphers. But all shared a love of books and literature.

"Everyone spoke their mind and shared their thoughts. It was a lively experience," Fu says.

The participants then decided to make it a weekly routine and Fu was elected president of the organization.

Since 2015, the reading club encouraged participants to interpret Shijing, or the Book of Songs, an ancient Chinese collection of poems, also one of the five Confucian classics.

More than 20 club members finished 80 essays that shed light on different aspects of the classic. These were then compiled into a book, which got the attention of Liu Yuqing, vice-president of the China Society for the Study of the Book of Songs, who's also a professor at the School of Language and Literature of Shanxi University, and head of the university's School of Chinese Classics.

Liu wrote the preface for the compilation.

"Fewer people are willing to read Shijing these days. I never dreamed that a group of people such as this would take the initiative to study it and deliver such good work," Liu says.

By the 10th session, Fu had created a WeChat group for club members.

In the discussion panels, everyone, from schoolteachers, business owners to villagers, from teenagers to octogenarians, has had an opportunity to step up to the podium and share their opinions about certain assigned topics. Moreover, there are lectures being held.

"We moved to the teahouse's meeting room to accommodate more people and some had to share a chair or sit on the floor," Fu recalls.

It didn't take long before the teahouse was no longer able to accommodate the volume of members.