Former Site of the Liaoyang South Manchuria Railway Library

In the southwest corner of Liaoyang's Baita Park, a single-story European-style building stands quietly among the trees. Built around 1907, this red-brick and concrete structure measures roughly twenty meters east-west by thirteen meters north-south. Its high ceilings, arched windows, and tiled pitched roof evoke a bygone era, while its interior wood floors still echo with the footsteps of its complex past.

The Mantetsu Liaoyang Library, which occupied this building, grew from a modest 338-volume reading room established in 1910 inside a Japanese-run primary school to a collection of 13,086 volumes by September 1937. By that time, an average of 2,210 visitors walked through its doors each month. They browsed local gazetteers, archaeological records, and geographic photographs—materials collected for Japanese military purposes.

The building's significance deepened in the spring of 1931. Nearby, at the now-demolished Liaota Hotel, Kwantung Army officers Seishiro Itagaki and Kanji Ishiwara met to plan the September 18th Incident, the railway bombing that triggered the occupation of northeast China. Because the hotel is gone, this preserved library now houses the memorial dedicated to exposing the conspiracy behind the September 18th Incident.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the building housed the municipal urban greening department, its rooms filled with the scent of soil and plans for public parks. In June 2016, the local government restored the original 260-square-meter open layout. Designated a Liaoyang Municipal Cultural Relics Protection Unit in 2017, the building now serves as a free public memorial. Visitors walk across the original wooden floorboards, looking through the arched windows at the park outside, contemplating the transition of this space from an instrument of colonial intelligence to a repository of historical memory.