Peter Zhou has amassed a long list of successes in his 25 years at UC Berkeley. But his landmark achievement is the C. V. Starr East Asian Library.
The pioneering library is a destination for scholars from across the globe and a fixture at the heart of the UC Berkeley campus. Opened in 2008, the building was the first in North America developed exclusively to house an East Asian collection. Zhou was instrumental in the planning and execution of the $52 million project, which brought to life the facility and its complementary Chang-Lin Tien Center for East Asian Studies.
In 2000, as a newly appointed assistant university librarian and director of the East Asian Library, or EAL, Zhou’s top task was to wrap up the project’s two-decade fundraising campaign. He collaborated with campus leaders, library colleagues, and donors to push the project across the finish line. To this day, he feels pride whenever he walks the library’s contemplative halls.
“We told the architects that we wanted this building to be a place where people can feel scholarship, can feel the power of history, can feel the power of world learning,” Zhou recalled. “I think this type of concept has been materialized in the design of the building.”
The facility epitomizes UC Berkeley’s longtime role as a bridge to the Asia-Pacific region, which goes back to the university’s early years, according to Zhou. In ways both large and small, Zhou himself has served as a bridge builder, helping span the cultural divide between Eastern and Western worlds. Zhou will retire in June, but his legacy as a librarian, linguist, and leader is certain to benefit scholars for generations.
World-class collector
Zhou grew up in Wuhan, China, during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution. Like millions of young people, he was sent to the countryside to work as a manual laborer after high school. At that time, he wasn’t sure he would even get a college education, let alone a doctorate in linguistics in the United States. And he certainly had no idea he would one day lead a research library.
As a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he was awed by the library and, in particular, its impressive Chinese collection. “It contained the works that I had always been familiar with, and also those I had never seen before, because they were published in different parts of the world,” he recalled. “America was the only country, as I saw it, that would have the vision to embrace this kind of knowledge of the world, and that also made an effort to systematically collect with this kind of intensity.”
That revelation was one of the reasons Zhou decided to step away from a burgeoning academic career in China to pursue an additional graduate degree in library science in the U.S. He saw librarianship as a way to combine his academic interests and cross-cultural competence.
As a highly regarded library leader, Zhou has devoted himself to building similarly broad, global-minded collections. Look no further than the Paul Kendel Fonoroff Collection for Chinese Film Studies, which was acquired in 2015.
After hearing about the collection from faculty members, Zhou met with Fonoroff in Hong Kong to discuss how Berkeley would be the best place to house the film critic’s awe-inspiring array of materials.
The collection — the largest of its kind in North America — contains more than 70,000 periodicals, posters, photographs, and pieces of ephemera that document the development of the film industry in greater China from the early 20th century to the 1990s. The archive’s focus on modern media, rather than ancient history, makes it atypical among East Asian studies library collections.
“Whoever studies Chinese film history, they have to come to Berkeley,” said Jianye He, the university’s librarian for Chinese collections. “Scholars in the United States, sometimes even from China, use this archive because it includes a lot of rare material.”
Another of Zhou’s notable acquisitions is the James Soong Archive. Soong, an esteemed statesman and UC Berkeley alumnus, donated the extensive collection to EAL earlier this year.
The archive documents Soong’s half-century career in the government of Taiwan (officially the Republic of China), starting in 1974, when he became premier Chiang Ching-kuo’s personal English-language secretary. He went on to serve as secretary-general of the Kuomintang political party during the Lee Teng-hui administration, and he was the only elected governor of Taiwan Province, holding office from 1994 to 1998. The archive, which comprises hundreds of thousands of letters, documents, photographs, and video recordings, is one of the largest research collections of its kind in the U.S.
“(These materials) form a very sound foundation for people to trace Taiwan’s evolution, and provide a lot of firsthand evidence to learn how the transformation from authoritarian rule to representative democracy was successful without violence,” Zhou said.
Sonia Ng, a historian and donor to EAL, worked closely with Zhou on another important acquisition: the archival collection of the Chee Kung Tong (also known as the Chinese freemasons). The group, based in San Francisco’s Chinatown since the gold rush era and registered as a company in California in the 1870s, helped Sun Yat-sen mobilize the Chinese diaspora to support the 1911 Revolution, which led to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty.
Ng, who helped the group assess where to donate the collection, said that Berkeley’s East Asian Library stood out among interested university libraries. Zhou made a compelling presentation to the committee about how EAL would handle the precious materials. His understanding of modern Chinese history and the enduring research value of the artifacts helped convince the group that UC Berkeley was the best fit.
“His knowledge, his sincerity, and his passion touched the heart of the (committee),” Ng said.
She added that Zhou has excelled at shepherding the valuable collection, which arrived on campus in 2018. The archive contains more than 5,000 documents, photos, and other artifacts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of those items will soon be fully available to scholars online. Many have never previously been accessible to the public.
Laudatory leader
For He, these major acquisitions speak to Zhou’s unique ability to build relationships — with donors and library colleagues.
“Peter was born to be a leader,” she said.
To illustrate, she shared an anecdote about preparing to open the then-new East Asian Library. Books from multiple campus locations needed to be integrated in the space, and the team had to shelve them by hand. Donning coordinated T-shirts to commemorate the project, the team enthusiastically tackled the task.
“Peter led us, together, as we shelved the books,” she said. “That’s the team, you know, the spirit. It’s great. We felt that this was our home, like we were moving to our own new home. Everyone was a part of it. And gradually we saw the library come into being.”
For his part, Zhou expressed pride in his team members for often going above and beyond in their work.
“They are well-regarded in their field for their scholarly training, and also for their passion,” he said. “They’ve helped make so much of our pioneering work possible.”
Zhou sees that work as a reflection of Berkeley’s innovative spirit. And he’s carried that ethos into his leadership by always keeping one eye focused on the future. He has, for example, put considerable emphasis on the digitization of the library’s treasures.
For his many achievements, Zhou received the 2022 Council on East Asian Libraries Distinguished Service Award. In presenting him with its highest honor, the council cited his “creativity, leadership, and scholarship” in support of East Asian libraries and East Asian studies. Zhou served as president of the council from 2012 to 2014.
Zhou has no intention of slowing down in retirement. He will continue to work on a variety of research and writing projects, and add to his extensive list of publications. He recently published a book in China titled The Convergence of World Civilizations, which showcases how collection-building can bridge cultures.
One of his upcoming projects will be to continue to study the life and work of famed Chinese linguist and scholar Yuen Ren Chao, who taught at UC Berkeley from 1947 to 1960. Zhou has already helped catalog Chao’s papers, which are held at The Bancroft Library, and make them accessible to the academic community. Zhou and two of his EAL colleagues also edited and published Chao’s diaries. The group aims to release even more of the linguist’s work.
“Peter’s contributions to UC Berkeley and to the field of East Asian studies are truly exceptional,” University Librarian Suzanne Wones said. “We celebrate his distinguished service, and wish him the best on his next adventure.”
Please consider making a gift to the East Asian Library Fund in honor of Peter Zhou’s retirement, and extend his legacy of cross-cultural learning to future students and scholars.