Bookstore travels from courtyard to main street

I'm from Dublin, Ireland, and after I graduated from university in 1992, I worked as a journalist for various newspapers and magazines in Central Europe and Africa. I moved to Hong Kong in 2000, and worked there as the foreign editor for a local newspaper, The Standard.

Around that time I caught the China bug. I was struck by how dynamic China was as it was going through a period of such frenetic change. It had just won the Olympic bid and was about to become part of the WTO. It was developing rapidly on every level and its emergence was having a massive global impact. It was a tremendously exciting place and so I decided to learn some Chinese and stick around.

Initially I worked as a journalist in Beijing, too, for the South China Morning Post and later as a China correspondent for the Telegraph in London. In 2002, my friend Alexandra Pearson came across a big book collection that was up for grabs and put the books in a friend's courtyard in Sanlitun North Street.