The bright yellow walls of the Former British Consulate sit atop Baihe Mountain, visible from the river as a stroke of architectural elegance. For over thirty years, however, this structure functioned less as a diplomatic office and more as an island of exclusion. Established in 1897 after Wuzhou was forced open as a treaty port, the consulate occupied three hilltops purchased for a trivial sum of twenty-four thousand copper coins. The British demarcated this space with stone boundary markers and erected signs at the base of the hill forbidding Chinese citizens from ascending. The building itself reflects a marriage of convenience between cultures: a brick-and-wood structure featuring deep, colonial-style verandas for cooling, capped with local glazed tiles.

This hilltop fortress relied on a perceived invulnerability that evaporated in the summer of 1925. Following the Shaji Massacre in Guangzhou, the city of Wuzhou erupted in protest. The consul's Chinese staff resigned en masse, stripping the residence of its daily function. Facing a hostile populace and a silent house, the British officials retreated to a warship and fled to Hong Kong, leaving the seven brick columns to guard an empty shell. The silence lasted until 1928, when the Guangxi government negotiated the property's return for 25,000 Hong Kong dollars. The site was subsequently transformed into a public park, marked by a stone tablet reading "Return Our Rivers and Mountains." Today, visitors walking the corridors step across a former boundary line. The panoramic view of the Xun, Gui, and Xi rivers—once the jealous prize of a foreign power—now belongs to the city that surrounds it.