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Former Site of the Single Dormitory of Anshan Showa Steel Works
Anshan, Liaoning, China
In 1920, the Tokyo Construction Company completed a singular brick-and-wood dormitory for the Anshan Iron Works. Located at 58 Wuyi Road, this structure, known as Jingjing Liao, is the sole survivor of three identical buildings. It stands on a triangular lot, its footprint an isosceles triangle that encloses a quiet central courtyard.
The building's architecture reflects the Russian Art Nouveau style. At the apex of the triangle sits a hexagonal hall. The corridors run centrally along the wings, flanked by rooms on both sides. At the base corners, semi-circular staircase towers rise, capped with dark red semi-spherical roofs. Visitors entering these towers pass beneath distinct shell-patterned motifs carved into the entrances. The structure rises 18.3 meters, reaching 19.03 meters at the tips of its chimneys. It contains a basement, three main floors, and an attic tucked beneath an A-frame timber truss sloped roof. The eave heights step upward from 2.86 meters on the first floor to 9.86 meters on the third.
The walls hold the memories of shifting histories. In 1933, management passed to the Shezhai Section of the Showa Steel Works to house Japanese staff. These rooms, once filled with the quiet chatter of foreign technicians, changed hands abruptly in 1945 when the Nationalist Government seized the property. By February 1948, following the communist liberation of Anshan, the building lay damaged by war. Ansteel repair crews arrived to patch the brickwork and reinforce the internal timber columns, transforming the site into Ansteel's First Staff Dormitory.
Decades later, the building adapted again. In the 1990s, the quiet corridors echoed with the ringtones of the Wuyi Road Mobile Phone Market, as local merchants partitioned the historic rooms into retail stalls. Today, preserved as a national historical site, the building is transitioning into an educational study base. The physical traces of its past—from the shell-patterned masonry to the sturdy timber trusses—remain as physical records of twentieth-century industrial history.