At No. 2 Lishu Street, the White Building is a two-storey rectangular block wrapped around an inner court. The Suifenhe Museum dates it to about 1913 and records an 882-square-metre site with 2,050 square metres of floor area. Its southwest entrance is framed by heavy twisted columns; the museum also notes an arched passage on the south side, a projecting pavilion-like platform at the southwest corner and a steep black iron roof. It is a local example of Russian eclectic architecture, shaped by a courtyard plan and unusually substantial walls.
From the journal
Suifenhe’s White Building
A 1913 railway official’s residence survives as a distinctive Russian eclectic building whose rooms passed through successive civic uses.
In the same city · Mudanjiang ↗A house beside the railway story
Two buildings, two kinds of memory
The building began as the residence of the chief commissioner of the railway negotiations bureau. In 1933 it became housing for Japanese employees of the South Manchuria Railway; after 1945 it housed Soviet railway specialists and offices. It later served single railway workers, then railway administration offices and staff housing, and from 2005 as a city government guesthouse. That succession—railway authority, employee housing, administration and lodging—shows how one railway-era residence was repeatedly absorbed into the town’s civic life. The former station, by contrast, now houses the Middle East Railway Memory Museum.