In the autumn of 1926, the crack of gunfire from the suppression of warlord factions had barely faded in southern China when General Chen Mingshu turned his attention to an entirely different kind of construction. He ordered the building of a library. Here on the shores of the Beibu Gulf, inside the newly established Hepu County No. 1 Middle School (the predecessor to Beihai Middle School), the battle-hardened commander of the "Iron Army" envisioned a sanctuary for reading.

The library he funded in 1927 is a Western-style building that today serves as his memorial hall on the school's Jiefang Road campus. Its imported design presents a stark departure from the traditional rammed-earth Hakka enclosures of his childhood in remote Zhangjia Village. The architecture reflects a man looking outward. Chen was a Hakka scholar’s son who left his isolated mountain home to study modern warfare, eventually traveling through Europe and organizing political resistance from Hong Kong. He wanted the youth of Beihai to have access to the broader world he had fought to open.

The building's survival carries its own historical weight. When Japanese aerial bombardment devastated the school grounds in 1938, students were forced to relocate to makeshift bamboo classrooms in the countryside. The solid library endured the attacks, serving as a physical anchor for a displaced community. Decades later, Chen's ancestral mud-brick home in the mountains was dismantled and submerged for a water reservoir project. The library in Beihai outlasted his birthplace, becoming his most permanent physical legacy in the region.

Today, museum visitors walking through the former Hepu Library encounter the artifacts of Chen's life. His preserved calligraphy bears a simple family motto: "Distribute wealth, teach goodness." The building itself fulfills this mandate. It is a space where the noise of twentieth-century warfare gives way to the quiet turning of pages. The structure asks us to consider how a soldier whose life was consumed by conflict chose to leave behind a quiet room dedicated to study.