Tourists read books at a bookshop in Shaxi Town, Jianchuan County, southwest China's Yunnan Province, March 17, 2025. (Xinhua/Chen Xinbo)

Through the weathered wooden door on a bluestone lane of the Old Street in Kunming, capital of southwest China's Yunnan Province, the air still hummed with 1926.

Here in the century-old Dongfang (Oriental) Bookstore, the gentle turning of pages mounted a furious resistance to the algorithms' roar. Its interior remains untouched by time -- a living mirror of the sepia photographs lining its walls.

The bookstore first opened its doors on Kunming's Guanghua Street, which later became an intellectual hub of the National Southwest Associated University (NSAU) during the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, serving as a torchbearer of culture amidst the flames of war.

As AI dominates information access today, Dongfang Bookstore offers what the online realm cannot -- original editions compiled pre-digitally. Page by page, readers engage with history manually, tracing it through handwritten marginalia that no algorithm can decipher.

"AI excels at 'knowing,' but fails at 'understanding,'" said Li Guohao, the bookstore curator, running his fingers along a yellowed book's spine. "Each reading here constitutes a co-creation with the text," he told us.

This seemingly "anti-efficient" persistence has, against all odds, resonated across continents. After receiving a gift of books from Dongfang Bookstore, an independent bookstore in Paris returned the gesture with a canvas tote emblazoned with its logo, together with a handwritten thank-you card.

"During the time of the NSAU, scholars such as Fei Xiaotong and Wang Zengqi often sought spiritual solace here," Li said, pointing to the time-browned photos on the wall.

One can't help but see the kindred destinies of Dongfang Bookstore and Shakespeare and Company in Paris. The former served as a harbor for China's wartime scholars adrift in turbulent times, while the latter sheltered James Joyce as he penned Ulysses.

A century on, Dongfang Bookstore's legacy is alive and well -- not just through the faithful restoration of its physical space, but equally through its curatorial choices.

"The original Dongfang Bookstore specialized in the humanities and social sciences, which is a tradition we uphold today," said Li, cradling a volume of Yunnan's pre-digital historical archives.

Today, the bookstore's curation philosophy -- rejecting eight genres of utilitarian literature from get-rich-quick schemes and self-help platitudes to cookie-cutter success manuals -- stands as a humanist manifesto against the algorithmic echo chambers.

At Dongfang Bookstore, we encountered Charlie, a British university professor who had specially traveled here with his wife, captivated by the legacy of Chinese luminary Lin Huiyin who used to study at the University of Cambridge.

"I am so surprised to find that this place houses British works from several decades ago," he said, pointing to the Wanyou Wenku on the shelves, a collectanea published during the late 1920s and the 1930s by the Commercial Press.

These out-of-print volumes exist beyond AI's reach, which Li likened to "data atolls" that preserve pre-digital scholarship. Here, smartphones fade into irrelevance as readers engage in the alchemy of paper and ink, forging neural connections no algorithm can replicate.

To engage its digital-native patrons, Dongfang Bookstore has innovated with literary mystery bundles, each containing a curated book paired with a handwritten postcard, said Li, adding that the bookstore also hosts regular reading salons to unearth hidden gems for a new generation of readers.

As night fell, young readers sat bathed in window light, their page-turning whispers weaving with the old street's bustle into a singular symphony of white noise.

The scene echoed the argument of renowned Chinese historical geographer Ge Jianxiong: true humanistic reading defies haste, much like our repeated recitations of classic Tang poems and Song verses -- each encounter sparking fresh revelations. For such reading, the printed word retains an enduring sanctity.

Just as Ernest Hemingway found inspiration for The Sun Also Rises through Shakespeare and Company's shelves, today's readers at Dongfang Bookstore reclaim the art of "offline thinking," where physical books teach neural weaving amidst AI's fragmentation of knowledge.

"Should we abandon reading today, surrendering entirely to science, technology and AI, what marrow would remain in the bones of our humanity?" Ge raised a question that he had long been pondering.

In the Dongfang Bookstore, the answer lingers within every tenderly turned page, where civilization's warmth persists, forever beyond algorithms' cold grasp.

"The bookstore isn't some anti-AI bunker, but a living testament that the most precious values can only be measured by the human heart," Li said.