AS9401 NLC-CN-AS

AS9401 (NLC-CN-AS) is registered through APNIC to the National Library of China (中国国家图书馆), the country's national deposit library in Beijing. Its registry record is administered via CERNET, China's national research and education network, which is the usual arrangement for Chinese academic and cultural institutions that hold their own AS number.

What it's used for

Effectively nothing, at present. RIS sees zero announced IPv4 prefixes, zero IPv6 prefixes and no address space originated by this AS at all, with a single BGP adjacency observed. An AS number that exists in the registry but originates no routes is dormant: the institution's public-facing services and staff connectivity reach the internet through address space announced by somebody else — in the Chinese academic context, most commonly a CERNET or carrier-held block — while this number sits reserved but unused in the global table.

That is worth stating plainly because it inverts the usual reading. Anyone geolocating traffic to AS9401 or expecting to find library systems inside it will find nothing, because there is nothing to find in BGP. The AS is a registry artefact, not a live network boundary.

Notable

• Dormant low-numbered ASNs like this are common: they were allocated when the barrier to getting one was low, and were never retired even after the operator stopped announcing independently.
• Because no prefix originates here, this ASN cannot meaningfully be classified by address-space behaviour. The identification rests entirely on the registry, not on routing.
• The registry contact is handled through the Chinese academic network rather than a commercial carrier, which is consistent with the library's status as a state cultural and research institution.