At 696 Ziyou Avenue, a stone monument guards the ghost of a vanished U-shaped building. Completed in 1938, the two-story reinforced concrete structure served as the Ministry of Education for the Puppet Manchukuo. Its minimalist facade featured deep yellow walls, a green tiled roof, and four imposing square pillars facing north. Inside this 10,000-square-meter complex, officials engineered cultural erasure. By 1943, they had stripped Chinese history from local textbooks and mandated eleven hours of Japanese language instruction weekly for university students. The ministry also drafted youth into hard labor.

The regime collapsed in 1945, and the building absorbed new lives. In 1949, students of the newly relocated Northeast Normal University hauled their own heavy wooden desks and luggage off trains, claiming the former ministry offices as their dormitories. By 1958, the site transformed into an affiliated primary school. For decades, narrow strips of sunlight pierced the corridors, warming the dark red floorboards. Generations of children ran through the halls, their small hands polishing the wooden stair handrails to a smooth, glass-like finish.

Time and disaster eventually claimed the original architecture. A severe fire in 1986 scarred the concrete, prompting an expansion to three stories. On March 5, 2002, the roar of heavy machinery echoed across the campus as crushers reduced the 1938 structure to dust. By July of that year, a modern five-story teaching facility rose on the exact footprint.

Today, the original deep yellow walls are gone. The children studying inside the new classrooms learn the history once banned on this very soil. Outside the school gates, the stone of the municipal heritage marker anchors the site to its past, ensuring the memory of the vanished U-shaped building remains intact.