The former Kwantung Army Headquarters building is now a People's Liberation Army facility, and the interior is not accessible. But the exterior — one of the most imposing military administrative buildings of the Manchukuo era — can be seen from the street and represents the architectural statement of colonial military power at its most direct.
The building was designed to project authority and permanence in equal measure. Visiting it alongside the Imperial Palace Museum reinforces the fundamental paradox of Manchukuo: that the nominal sovereign (Puyi) occupied a building designed to look imperial while the actual power (the Kwantung Army) sat in a building designed to look military. The geographical relationship between the two buildings in the city — the distance, the positioning, the scale — tells the political story without requiring any interpretation.