In October 1979, the Lijiang Prefecture Library began inside a single book room at the local Mass Art Center. It became the Lijiang City Library in 2003. A year later, in March 2004, workers demolished the original structure to clear space for municipal development along the Yumi River. For years, the library operated without a permanent home.The new 8,904-square-meter facility opened on December 17, 2014.

The building accommodates over 800 daily readers. In the first-floor lobby, visitors encounter a background wall featuring forty distinct calligraphic styles of the word "book," spanning from the Qin to the Qing dynasties. Beside these characters, twenty-eight lines of poetry from ancient Dongba scriptures are carved directly into the wall. Visitors can run their fingers over these ancient pictographs. To the left, the National Library of China Special Literature Space occupies 200 square meters, offering sixty seats. Nearby, a barrier-free reading room provides four hundred braille books, where visually impaired patrons read by feeling the raised paper dots. This room also holds two thousand large-print books and one hundred audio devices.

The library houses 350,000 paper volumes, including rare Naxi Dongba scriptures and local gazetteers. Under the leadership of Director Fan Yongzhen, the library has built an urban-rural network of sixty external distribution points and thirteen branches. One branch, the Xuan Ke Music Library, preserves the private collection of scholar Xuan Ke. Here, the scent of Yunnan coffee mixes with the pages of twenty-six thousand books, while the sounds of traditional flutes drift from the courtyard. Another branch, the Jigu Book and Newspaper Office, sits quietly in the Black Dragon Pool park.

The library's identity is captured in its official logo, designed by Cheng Hongdu, which merges the characters for Litu with the shape of Lijiang's historic archways. The institution continues to promote the regional philosophy of "Tianyu Liufang," a Naxi phrase meaning "go study." It remains a quiet sanctuary where the past is preserved in ink and stone.