Four thick red pillars anchor a symmetrical brick-and-wood facade at 46 Xinkang Road in Ya'an. Built in 1951, this two-story structure projects an air of permanent administrative authority. It was constructed to serve as the political heart of Xikang, a massive province bridging the Sichuan basin and the Tibetan plateau. Four years after the builders finished the roof, the central government erased Xikang from the map. The building outlived the geopolitical entity it was designed to govern.

Known today as "Kang Lou," the structure speaks the architectural language of early 1950s China. It stretches nearly 57 meters across a rigid, Soviet-inspired axis of symmetry. The builders employed a strict three-part hierarchy, elevating the central block above the flanking wings to enforce a visual sense of order. This design communicated stability and centralized power to a remote, newly integrated frontier. The architects achieved this imported aesthetic entirely with local materials. Small, traditional black tiles cover the 2,378-square-meter roof, resting on a structural skeleton of regional brick and timber. The edifice merges sweeping national ideology with immediate material reality.

Inside the fifty-odd rooms, provincial administrators spent the early 1950s managing a vast geographical transition. Officials working behind these walls nationalized local tea factories, stabilized regional grain supplies, and directed the engineering of the treacherous Sichuan-Tibet highway. The building functioned as the absolute nerve center for a territory undergoing massive physical and social reconstruction.

In the autumn of 1955, Xikang Province was formally dissolved. The land was partitioned between Sichuan and the emerging Tibet Autonomous Region. Ya'an lost its capital status, and the General Office was quietly emptied of its political mandate. Within months, the state handed the complex to the newly formed Sichuan Agricultural College.

For the past seven decades, the former provincial headquarters has operated as a university administrative building. Generations of academics and students have walked the same corridors where officials once drafted highway plans for the Himalayas. The grand architecture, conceived to command a sprawling frontier province, now grounds a quiet academic campus shaded by aging parasol trees. The structure holds the memory of a vanished province entirely intact within its timber frame.