At No. 41 Beiwu Ma Road, a three-story brick-and-stone building rests in the shape of an airplane. Designed by the South Manchuria Railway Company in 1921, this structure originally housed the first Japanese old-system girls' high school in the railway zone. Today, students of Shenyang No. 20 Middle School still push open the original five-to-six-centimeter-thick wooden doors, their hands resting exactly where teenagers' hands rested a century ago.

The red-painted exterior walls and grey-tiled roof project the architectural ambitions of the Meiji and Taisho periods. A classical portico crowns the elevated central entrance, demanding a formal ascent up its stone steps. Inside, the wide corridors were engineered to trap winter heat and capture summer breezes.

These halls hold the echoes of shifting eras. In 1924, the school began admitting Chinese students alongside Japanese pupils. On a spring day in May 1929, the grounds hosted a historic women's baseball game between the Japanese students and Chinese peers from a neighboring normal school. The crack of the bat marked an early chapter in international women's sports. By the 1940s, the freezing Manchurian winters transformed the grounds into a training hub for top-tier female ice skaters.

The building absorbed the shocks of history. In 1935, it was renamed Fengtian Naniwa Girls' High School. A decade later, a 1945 fire scorched the interior, leaving the smell of ash in the surviving east wing. The structure endured. Following the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the rooms shifted from classrooms to government offices, housing the Northeast Ministry of Health and the Planning Commission.

In 1956, the site returned to its educational roots as Shenyang No. 20 Middle School. Recognized in 2013 as a Municipal Cultural Relic Protection Unit, the surviving main teaching building stands as a quiet observer of a century's passage. The heavy wooden doors continue to swing open, bridging the early twentieth century with the present day.