The Chinese Local Chronicles Library, the largest of the kind in China, has opened to the public in Ningbo, a coastal city in east China's Zhejiang Province.

The library, which resembles the country's oldest private library, Tianyige, now has some 5,000 volumes of local records, making up 70 percent of the country's total.

In the collection are 271 volumes of local records from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), which account for one-third of all the existing annals of local history from the period.

Tianyige was established about 400 years ago and has since amassed a large collection of ancient books.