"A good bookstore should become a symbol of a city's spirit. It can help to improve the quality of people's lives, and allow the nation to develop and prosper," Qian Xiaohua says. [Photo provided to China Daily]

If there is a term that can best describe Qian Xiaohua, owner of the Librairie Avant-Garde bookstore in Nanjing's Wutaishan region, Jiangsu province, it might be "poetic idealist".

Wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a black shirt, Qian, 53, looks like a teacher, serious yet amiable, humble yet lighthearted.

In his many articles and poems, he often describes himself as a lonely soul drifting across a strange land. And at one point in his life, the loneliness and sleepless nights he faced was so tremendous it threatened to devour him. This was when his dream of running a purely intellectual bookstore as a haven from the outside world came crashing down around him.

After opening his first 17-square-meter bookstore in Nanjing in 1996, Qian had encountered consecutive failures by the early 2000s, after investing heavily in two more bookstores, one near the Confucius Temple, and the other in Nanjing's central business district, Xinjiekou. Hearing of the failure of the Confucius Temple bookstore, many publishing houses urged Qian to repay debts of up to 2.5 million yuan ($376,300).

"This chilled my heart. I couldn't believe that fellow humanists could do this to another humanist," Qian said in a previous interview.

In 2005, after negotiating with the landlord to close his bookstore that had failed after just two years, Qian took a taxi back to Guangzhou Road, the location of his other bookstore.