Scattering Seeds

Unexpected books often appear in unexpected places. Once, when I was visiting a very remote part of Yunnan Province, browsing through books in the house that I was renting, I found a box set of works by the Neo-confucianist critic Dai Zhen. There was a small library despite the fact that the owner of the home could barely read and his son was only in secondary school. I asked about the origins of the books but the owner could not say.