In 1916, a prominent merchant named Li Pinfeng from Shiping County began building a massive tin-smelting complex at No. 42 Baofeng Lane in Gejiu. The construction took ten years, finishing in 1926. To realize his vision, Li assembled a diverse team. He hired a chief engineer from Vietnam, while local craftsmen from Tonghai and Shiping executed the masonry and carpentry. They used materials shipped from France alongside local Yunnan resources, creating a fortified castle that climbed the sloping hillside.

The architecture reflects this global meeting of styles. The eastern gate tower features a French-style four-sloped roof covered in red flat tiles. On its second floor, a three-bay performance stage contains wooden railings, curved "beauty-leans" benches, and diamond-pattern wooden flooring. Nearby, the flat-roofed main building stands with yellow exterior walls, a blue stone archway, and double-leaf wooden-glass windows set into heavy stone frames. Inside, French-style floor tiles line the rooms. Adjacent to this, the left wing showcases traditional Chinese design, built with fine-jointed green bricks and a single-eaved gray tube-and-plate tile hard mountain roof. It houses a stone milling room. On the defensive perimeter, the left watchtower still features narrow shooting holes cut into its north, east, and south brick walls.

The complex served as a major tin-smelting workshop. Its purpose shifted dramatically over the decades. Between 1951 and 2002, the government repurposed the site as the Gejiu Third Detention Center and a drug rehabilitation clinic. During this era of confinement, workers demolished the southern courtyard, the right wing, and the northern courtyard's two-story building to make room for prison cells and municipal court offices. Only a brick-and-timber corridor remains of the right wing today.

In 2003, the Gejiu Municipal Cultural Relics Administration took control of the property. Extensive restorations between 2016 and 2018 revived the surviving structures, including the embroidery building and the remnants of the northern smelting furnaces. Today, the complex stands as the last surviving tin-smelting heritage site in Gejiu, preserving the physical memory of Yunnan's early industrial age.