Along Kunming’s Qianwang Street, two early twentieth-century estates stand side by side, preserving the quiet weight of Yunnan's mercantile and military history.

In 1923, Ma Zhen, a Bai ethnic general who became Kunming’s first mayor in 1928, built the Majia Courtyard. This two-story wood-and-brick structure follows the traditional Bai layout of four courtyards and five skywells. A continuous upper veranda connects the rooms, overlooking a central bluestone courtyard. Here, the smell of aged timber lingers. Visitors can touch the deep grooves of wood carvings depicting peonies, bats, and clouds, still catching the light with their original gold leaf. The house survived Japanese aerial bombs during the Second World War. Today, rain drips from the tiled eaves into the open skywells during performances of the classic drama Thunderstorm, which actors perform directly on the stone floor.

A few steps away sits the former Fuchunheng Trading House, built in 1924 by Jiang Zonghan, an ethnic Yi general who founded the firm in 1876. Once a powerful financial hub trading in silk, jewelry, and medicinal herbs, the mansion became the company's headquarters in 1928 before economic shifts forced its closure in 1937. After 1949, the building housed dozens of families as a crowded public tenement. Its western wing features a complex "Six Harmonies in Spring" layout, combining a three-building-and-screen-wall design with a four-sided courtyard. Inside, the cool touch of imported French floor tiles and the soft, diffused light of embossed glass reveal a taste for global luxury. On the wooden pillars, hand-painted political slogans from different decades remain visible, left by the residents who once cooked and lived in these shared spaces.

Now restored, these structures serve new purposes. The Majia Courtyard won a UNESCO conservation award in 2001, while the Fuchunheng site operates as a boutique hotel and restaurant. They remain physical archives of Kunming's transition from an imperial frontier to a modern trading city.