A 57 year old poet named Jiang Libo in China has spent $116,000 building a bookshop in a remote village on top of a mountain. The Milestone Bookstore is located in a rural area of Zhejiang province in eastern China, surrounded by farmland and woodland atop a mountain. The bookstore is built in the shape of the number seven and has a collection of 7,000 mostly literary books.

The self-published poet built the remote bookstore over the past three years to encourage literacy and to improve book access for young readers. “Before my bookshop was built, the closest bookshop or library to this village was in a town about 30km away,” Jiang said. “I found fewer and fewer people read books, and bookstores generally are struggling. However, I acted in contravention of this by opening a bookstore in a place with very few readers,” he said. “My thought is: when villagers are idle, or kids are on holiday, they can come to read books. Isn’t that wonderful?”