On the freezing night of November 2, 1948, a convoy of trucks rumbled into the outskirts of Shenyang, carrying four thousand exhausted cadres from Tieling. By morning, they established the Shenyang Special Military Control Commission inside a modest 1920s brick-and-wood building at 89-3 Guilin Street. This two-story European-style structure, capped with a heavy cement tile roof, became the nerve center for a city on the brink of collapse.

Inside the 385-square-meter space, the layout strictly divided labor and rest. The ground floor hummed with the clatter of typewriters and urgent voices from the accounting room and staff offices. Upstairs, Director Chen Yun occupied the western bedroom, while his secretary slept in the eastern quarters. Neighbors often saw a solitary lamp burning through the night in Chen Yun’s window. Under that glow, he drafted the November 28 report that would become the Shenyang Experience. His pen scratched across paper, outlining a radical approach to urban recovery: keep everything intact, take over first, and distribute later. The results materialized rapidly. By November 7, the hum of restored electricity and the rush of clean water returned to the city's pipes. Downstairs, administrators calculated survival rations, handing out crisp 100,000 Northeast currency notes to anxious workers—enough to buy twenty kilograms of coarse, life-sustaining sorghum. Vice Directors Wu Xiuquan and Tao Zhu helped orchestrate this massive transition from these very rooms. They managed the surrender of weapons, the reopening of factories, and the stabilization of chaotic markets. The walls of this Heping District headquarters absorbed the tension of those days in November.

Today, the preserved floorboards still creak under the footsteps of visitors. The building stands as a quiet witness to the exact moment a rural army learned to govern an industrial metropolis. The ink from Chen Yun’s desk mapped the blueprint for a nation’s urban future, turning a small brick house into the crucible of modern Chinese administration.