Lu Zuofu founded the private Jianshan Middle School at Beibei in the autumn of 1930. The name came from the line about improving oneself alone in poverty and helping the world in prosperity, and the school set itself the motto work hard, study at Jianshan, which it has kept since. Alongside the teaching it ran its own enterprises: a farm, a dining room, the Jianshan Apartment and a lime works. They were a place where students worked and a way of paying the bills without asking anyone else, which is why a modest cooperative block in a mining town is still worth a walk.
From the journal
Jianshan Apartment and the town Lu Zuofu built
A school that ran a farm, a dining room, an apartment and a lime works to pay for itself, in the Jialing mining town of Beibei.
In the same city · Beibei ↗A school that paid for itself
Building a town on the Jialing
Beibei stands on the Jialing north of Shapingba, and Lu spent twenty years changing it. In 1927 he hired a Danish engineer to survey a railway to the coal country, opened in March 1935; in 1928 he turned a temple into the district library with about four hundred donated books, and in 1930 the upper hall of a hilltop temple into a science academy. He built a hot-spring park at the foot of Jinyun Mountain, a public park on Huoyan Hill, and a sports ground where 1,161 athletes from 38 units competed in the Jialing Games of April 1929.