On March 7, 1959, Director Wu Xuezhou pressed his pen to a diary page, pleading for a new facility to house national cutting-edge tasks. Three years later, the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry inaugurated its 11,590-square-meter main building at No. 5625 Renmin Street. Rising from the former grounds of the Manchukuo Continental Academy of Sciences, the reinforced concrete structure features a six-story central tower flanked by symmetrical five-story wings. Sunlight catches the sweeping single-eave roofs, illuminating rows of green glazed tiles and an exterior skin of yellow and white porcelain.

Inside these walls, human hands reshaped the molecular world. In the late 1950s, researchers in cramped laboratories synthesized unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine. Satellite architect Qian Xuesen selected their formula, and this exact solid propellant eventually ignited China’s first intercontinental ballistic missile in May 1980. The corridors soon hummed with the magnetic pulse of the nation’s first domestic nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, assembled here in 1982.

The building breathes with the continuous labor of 33 academicians. Today, scientists beneath the same green tiles engineer diradical self-assembled molecules, pushing perovskite solar cell efficiency to 26.3 percent. Others perfect the Epoxide Apparent Exchange reaction, eliminating harsh sodium hydroxide to yield pure, low-viscosity resins flowing smoothly at 3.7 pascal-seconds.

Recognized as one of Changchun’s Ten Great Buildings and a Seventh-Batch Provincial Cultural Relic, the structure remains an active laboratory. It even served as a backdrop in the television drama A Lifelong Journey. The kiln-fired tiles and thick concrete walls mute the roar of modern traffic, preserving a quiet space for discovery. The cradle of Chinese applied chemistry stands as a living workshop, where mid-century architectural elegance houses the ongoing pursuit of atomic precision.