The front doors opened to an airy atrium, four stories tall, with a glass wall looking out to an elegant garden. People were lounging in a small coffee shop as I climbed the open steel-railinged staircase four floors to the top, where the foreign collections are housed. I left my rusty Mandarin at the front door and figured I would seek out someone in English to tell me about the library today.

Hundreds of people were working at small tables in the foreign periodicals section, nearly all of them using their own laptops. Most had settled in with thermoses of tea, some with sandwiches. The best seats overlooked the central atrium. A few old men were hunched closely up to their laptops, pecking with two fingers. Students were doing all sorts of things from serious-looking research to using the wildly popular “wechat,” China’s version of Facebook. It was eerily hushed, even for a library, and especially for any place in China.

There were more rows of periodicals than I could count; in English, German, Russian and on topics from metallurgy to aeronautics. I headed to the linguistics books; the collection was spotty and aged, I thought, and looked more like random books people had donated over the years than orderly acquisitions.

I followed the English-speaking librarian, a woman perhaps in her late 40s—I find it always hard to tell the age of Asian women—to a back room to talk. I explained my mission and told her the story of what I had seen of America’s reinvention of its libraries.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt myself as though in the middle of Chinese-American negotiations. “But the scholars,” she protested, saying it sounded to her like there is no place for scholars anymore if the libraries are all about these other missions. "What about the scholars?"

I said that books and research and information are still the main mission of the library, and all the rest are new additions. She protested further that people could go to community centers or Starbucks if they wanted to get together or have coffee with their work, citing the dancing, singing, and chess activities available in any Chinese town’s cultural centers. I repeated that books remain Mission One. She declared sternly, “It sounds like books are Mission Seven.” She was pawing at me like a cat with a mouse. Astonishing.

Then, when I pointed out the coffee shop in the library entry downstairs, and the beautiful gardens outdoors, she pivoted, laughed, and said, "Oh yes, we have those things. And would you like to see our makerspace?” Makerspace! She even knew the modern vocabulary.

The librarian directed me to the other side of the library to see the “The Creation New Space." I worried about finding someone who would speak English there, and she said, shooing me on, “They’re all young. They’ll speak English.” She was mostly right. The Creation Space is a bright, white, modern multi-purpose area. A young woman named “Yuzzy” showed me around. (Almost all Chinese have English names, to make it easier on us, and many of those names are, well, unconventional.) The space opened in 2013. Yuzzy pointed to collections of design books on architecture, industry, clothing, and more: The space's LED lighting, state of the art software, access to vast databases, table-sized design screens, and a 3-D printer.