The three houses were renovated for different purposes — books, coffee and creative cultural products.
"We tried our best to preserve all the wooden structures in the original space," Zhao says.
"We made the smallest changes to the inner structure, so the second floor of the cafe is like a museum of the traditional residences in Shangri-La. We lifted the roof to let light in and brighten the residence."
Another fascinating point is that each house had a granary. Builders left a square opening on the rammed-earth facade and covered it with wooden slats for ventilation.
"Since we don't need granaries in a bookstore, we removed them. We transformed the openings into doors and built concrete walkways that connect the three houses and with the land, which is an important part of my design," Zhao says.
Zhao believes that the bookstore should be an outgrowth of the vast land on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, helping people connect with the soil and experience its authenticity. He created the walkways to encourage people to go out and stroll through the fields, mountains, rivers and clouds.
The building process was by no means easy.
The construction team coming from outside knew that they needed to delegate part of the work to the villagers according to local customs. After the harvest in September, villagers were free so the team hired them to tear down broken walls to increase their incomes while building good relations with them.
However, the villagers lacked the required skills, so the construction team had to carefully instruct them.
Another problem was rebuilding the rammed-earth walls to enclose the yards. Having no idea what to do, the team members turned to the villagers. To their surprise, though this type of wall had almost been abandoned in Shangri-La, elderly villagers still retained memories of building houses with their fathers.
"I was so frustrated that I thought we should abandon the plan of building rammed-earth walls. However, with the help of the local people, we continued. Nothing is more 'site-specified' than this. Looking back, it is such a gift from the land to our project," writes the on-site architect Liao Fuhong in his construction notes.
Offering a view of the Haba Snow Mountain across the Jinsha River, the upper stream of the Yangtze River, the bookstore houses 15,000 books on humanities and social sciences and 100 types of creative cultural products with local elements. Readers can also find books about local cultures, geography, languages and history.
"It's great that there are so many books about Tibetans and Shangri-La at the bookstore. These books can connect different cultures," Tsering Dondrub says.
In the house for creative cultural products, people can find refrigerator magnets inspired by natural and cultural landmarks, such as the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery, an important Tibetan Buddhism site in Yunnan, the Haba Snow Mountain, prayer wheels, bookmarks inspired by Tibetan scripts and brooches inspired by Tibetan Opera masks.
