For many Chinese, Colombo is a great place to shop for jewelry and tea, but for Li Yong, the Sri Lankan capital is the location of the latest in his chain of Chinese bookstores.

Li's company, Kunming Xinzhi Group, is China's largest private book retailer, with 58 outlets around the country. It opened its fifth overseas bookstore in late November in Sri Lanka. The 450-square-meter shop is the first in South Asia, but others have opened in Phnom Penh, Vientiane, Kuala Lumpur and Mandalay in Myanmar during the past two years.

"We have a medium-term plan that by 2015 we will have 10 bookstores in Southeast and South Asia. Our long-term plan is to have 20 around the world by 2020," said Li, the founder and president of Kunming Xinzhi, who began conducting market research into Southeast Asia in the mid-1990s, finally opening the first overseas store in Phnom Penh in Cambodia in November 2011. He found that the demand for knowledge about China and for Chinese language learning aids is growing rapidly in the region, so the company decided to focus on Asian cities with large populations of ethnic Chinese and Chinese entrepreneurs.