[Photo provided to China Daily]

In the run-up to this, Qian's father had died and he had broken up with his girlfriend of five years. He had originally planned to fulfill his dream of building a 160-meter-long reading corridor in the avant-garde-decorated bookstore in the basement of a shopping mall, to create "a room for people to rest their souls."

It was a stormy afternoon. As he climbed into a taxi, tears started running down his face as he set off for Guangzhou Road.

"It was the most difficult time in my life. I sold my house and had to sleep on the desk of the bookstore," he says.

He quoted the line "The soul is a strange shape on Earth" from Austrian poet Georg Trakl's poem Springtime of the Soul as the slogan for the Librairie Avant-Garde, a line that taps into feelings of displacement and homesickness.

"In Nanjing, I'm a stranger from another city. Staff working at the Librairie Avant-Garde are all strangers from other cities, many of our readers are strangers from other cities, and the books on our shelves are also strange souls from other cities. The bookstore itself is a strange shape on Earth, a home for drifting souls," he says.

Qian, unmarried and childless, treated his bookstores like children. So far he has had 13 bookstores, all different from each other with their own designs, names, and types of books.

"I don't repeat myself or bore customers with the same atmosphere. Each of my children is brand-new, has their own personality and can blend in with their location," he says.

The Yongfeng Poets' Society near the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum among his 13 bookstores is devoted to poetry, the literary genre that Qian prefers above all the others.