The Eight Grand Ministries — the former government buildings of the Manchukuo state — are scattered across central Changchun and represent the most ambitious architectural program of the colonial period. Built in the 1930s and early 1940s in a distinctive blend of Japanese imperial style and Western neoclassicism, they were intended to make Hsinking (the Japanese name for Changchun) look like a modern capital.
Most have been converted into university buildings — Jilin University and Northeast Normal University occupy several of them — and are not accessible for formal tours, but they can be seen from the street and some buildings allow visitors to walk the corridors. The uniformity of style and scale across these different sites, distributed through the city, gives a sense of the totalising ambition of the Manchukuo project: this was an attempt to build an entirely new capital city from scratch, and the architectural evidence is everywhere if you know to look for it.
A self-guided walk connecting the principal buildings takes a half day and is one of the more revealing urban history experiences in northeast China. The tourist maps of Changchun generally mark the main sites.