Rural Folks, Rural Strokes

They fled to the cities looking for opportunities, but now they have returned to their country roots, conquered by the power of art and culture

As Wang Shouchang sits sipping from a coffee cup, he revels in a photo book on Hui-style architecture. Behind him on bookshelves sit One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham, among many other books, and beyond the walls, in the distance, with mountains covered in mist, a cow earns its daily keep in the rice fields.

The 200-year-old ancestral hall in the village of Bishan, in Anhui province, in which Wang is sitting now serves as an art bookshop.