Former Site of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Puppet Manchukuo

At Number 8 Ziyou Avenue in Changchun, the earth holds the memory of a vanished monolith. In 1937, laborers poured cold reinforced concrete to construct a two-story, 9,871-square-meter fortress shaped like a drawn bow. Facing north, this structure anchored the Puppet Manchukuo regime’s Eight Major Ministries. Its architects crowned the Western neo-classical frame with a sweeping roof of green glazed tiles, manifesting the imperial Xing'ya style.

Behind those heavy doors, colonial administrators drafted the Puppet Manchurian Industrial Development Five-Year Plan. By 1940, the building housed the Ministry of Agriculture. Clerks at wooden desks calculated quotas, transforming the region's fertile soil into a supply line for a widening war. Through the Xingnong Cooperatives, officials monopolized the harvest. They forced local farmers to surrender their grain, systematically draining the land's nutrients and leaving the agricultural workforce impoverished. The ledgers inside this bow-shaped building recorded the extraction of millions of tons of crops, turning the sweat of rural laborers into military rations.

The physical structure survived the war's end, sheltering students from National Changchun University before falling to the wrecking ball in 1998. The green tiles and concrete walls were cleared away entirely. Today, the High School Attached to Northeast Normal University occupies this exact geographic footprint.

The site remains a recognized historical location, preserving the urban layout of the 1930s occupation. Where colonial officers once mapped out resource extraction, teenagers now carry backpacks across a modern campus. The ringing of school bells has replaced the sharp commands of wartime bureaucrats. The soil beneath the asphalt remembers the heavy tread of the past.