National Library of China

National Library of China
中国国家图书馆
National Library of China North Complex
Location	Beijing, China
Type	National library
Established	September 1909 (114 years ago) (1909-09)
Collection
Size	41 million (December 2020)[1]
Access and use
Access requirements	Open to the public
Population served	1.4 billion
Other information
Director	Wang Chunfa (since 2017)
Website	nlc.cn

The National Library of China (NLC) is the national library of China, located in Beijing, and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It contains over 41 million items as of December 2020.^[1][2] It holds the largest collection of Chinese literature and historical documents in the world^[3] and covers an area of 280,000 square meters.^[4] The National Library is a public welfare institution funded by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

The collections of the National Library have inherited the royal collections since the Southern Song Dynasty and private collections since the Ming and Qing dynasties. The oldest collections can be traced back to the oracle bones of Yin Ruins more than 3,000 years ago.^[5]

The National Library is a major research and public library, with items in 123 languages^[6] and in many formats, both print and digital: books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings. As of December 2020, the collection contains more than 41 million volumes and is growing at a rate of one million volumes per year.^[7] The total amount of digital resources exceeds 1000TB and is growing at a rate of 100TB per year.^[8]

The National Library of China was initially founded as the Imperial Peking Library by the Qing government in 1909. After several name changes and administrative alternation, it was renamed the National Library of China in 1999.^[9] The National Library now consists of the South Complex, the North Complex, the Ancient Books Hall,^[10] the Children's Hall, and seventeen dispatched research libraries to the central government's various departments and the Academy of Military Sciences.^[11][12]