Yang Liwei is China's first astronaut to travel into space, and his name is closely tied to the beginnings of the country's crewed space program. The library holds one work by him, The Nine Layers of Heaven and Earth, classified under general biography. The publicly available material on him is limited: his birth year, native place, education, and career posts are not recorded in the library, making a systematic account of his life difficult. Judging by its subject, The Nine Layers of Heaven and Earth is documentary writing grounded in personal experience, centering on astronaut training, selection, and spaceflight, and combining memoir with popularization of space knowledge. Such writing tends to be plain and restrained in tone, emphasizing real processes and inner feelings rather than dramatic effect. For general readers its value lies in a first-hand view of a crucial step in China's crewed space program, and it offers a practitioner's own example for related biographical writing.
