A shared kitchen behind a modest thatched-roof annex connects two entirely different eras at Dong'erdao Street. On one side lived Qingchang, a Manchu official tasked with tallying the silver reserves of the waning Qing empire. On the other side worked Zhu Zongliang, a pioneering educator laying the groundwork for modern women's schooling in northeastern China. The physical layout of the property precisely maps this historical transition.

The main compound stands as a traditional two-courtyard siheyuan. Its five principal rooms, built with heavy grey brick under sweeping hard-mountain roofs, reflect the orderly, hierarchical life of its owner. Qingchang—known locally as Master Xiaoqing—was a Plain White Banner man who managed the silver vault for the Heilongjiang General’s Office. In 1905, his decades of meticulous accounting earned him a rare imperial promotion to a rank-six official. His residence endures as a pristine example of late Qing official architecture, complete with preserved wooden framing in its flanking three-room wings.

To the east of this formal masonry stood a much humbler structure. Qingchang rented out two and a half thatched-roof rooms on the edge of his property to Zhu Zongliang, who had arrived from the south to modernize the province's education system. Zhu claimed this peripheral space for an unprecedented project.

She arranged a small shrine to Confucius in a central room measuring barely ten feet across. Beneath the south-facing window, her first three female students sat on the warm, heated brick kang to read their books. These young women shared the cooking fire out back with the silver vault master. The arrangement localized a massive societal shift within the intimate, practical constraints of a domestic courtyard.

The initiative quickly outgrew its thatched walls. By 1910, the initial class of three had expanded into a formal institution teaching 260 young women from fifteen different provinces. Early students left written records detailing the cramped space, the shared kitchen, and the sheer difficulty of establishing female literacy in a frontier city.

The imperial system that elevated Qingchang dissolved shortly after, sweeping away his rank and his vault. The physical shell of his official compound survives as a record of late-imperial construction methods. The enduring weight of the site stems equally from the east courtyard. The formal grey bricks and the memory of the thatched roof together preserve the exact coordinates where Heilongjiang’s women first gathered around a southern window to study.