Those two rows of pine trees in front of the library buildings were planted at the centennial anniversary ten years ago, there were 100 trees. 100 is a perfect number, though time will never cease because of a perfect number, it is 110 after 100.

This year is 110th anniversary of Dalian Library, another ten years have passed.

The trunk of centennial anniversary trees has only turned to be as thick as rim of a bowl after ten years’ sunshine nurtured and storm exposed. I once thought that, “it takes ten years to grow trees, but a hundred years to rear people（十年树木，百年树人）” means that trees take only ten years to grow into useful timber, but people take a hundred, for this thought, I had been worried that it would be too short to become an useful person.

Hanging on my office wall is a photo taken in 2007, a photo of the library family. It only takes ten years to turn people in this picture to be fat, to thin down, to leave, even to be gone……no one has been 100 years old. On chasing footsteps of time, people make better chasers than trees.

The full doctrine about trees, human and time is: “One year’s plan, cereals would be better; ten years’ plan, trees would be better; a life long’s plan, people would be better. Plant once cereals and yield one time; plant once trees and yield ten times; plant once people and yield a hundred times. If we intensely cultivate people and ingeniously use them, the country will be efficiently governed, this is the statecraft of being an emperor”. Guan Zhong told the emperor and his people, the most important thing is nurture men of talent. Nurture men is more important than tree planting and cereal planting; cereal planting benefits slightly, tree planting benefits middling, and men planting benefit the most and the longest. Cultivating talents is the magic weapon to govern a country, to inherit and develop civilization of mankind from generation to generation.

Time is the only eternal winner. It won over trees, won over mankind, and won over all things, it developed everything into the past. But humans are great beyond ourselves’ imagination, humans record all of the changes with hearts, put them in books, and put books into libraries, which exist as another kind of eternal that created by humans for chasing their past and their future.

The year 2007 sees the anniversary of the publishing of library journal DaTu. I wrote in the prologue: “When I look backward and forward, gaze into the distance with seemingly no end in sight, a sense of mission wells up and I think it is time to put a road sign there to link past and future.” Now, it’s time to put another road sign——the corpus. The corpus has no greetings and wishes, no reviews and summaries, but only collects dozens of writings about books, collect books, reading and people read, for this library of 110.   

    
Another ten years, different commemoration.