Built in 1918, this two-story brick-wood construction was the very first securities exchange owned and run by Chinese. Today, the crumbling dwelling is home to eight families.
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The first floor was the business hall, which was divided down the middle with five open rooms. Various additions constructed by resident families now occupy the hall, leaving only a narrow pathway for people to pass through.
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The second floor, which hovers over the main hall, was surrounded by a gallery. It's now divided into different living areas.
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The site has since served as makeshift dorms for various institutions and residents. Most of the families now living inside it are empty nesters who've lived here for decades. Stock trading ceased when the Communist Party took over China.
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The interior design was a fusion of Chinese and Western styles, as indicated by the wooden pilasters and intricately designed iron fence that lines the gallery.
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Xu Yang (left) and Xiao Xiaoxiao have lived here for years. Their home is a handed-down 20-square-meter room near the entrance of the former stock exchange building.
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The couple has reconstructed the 5-meter-tall room, carving out space for a bathroom and a play loft for their 3-year-old son, Abu. The family had a 3-meter-wide bed made after Abu was born.
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Xiao lifts up her son's cartoon carpets to show the only trace of the building's history in their home -- the original wooden floor.
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Their neighbor Liu Junrong, 54, has been a resident since 1989.
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Liu has a spacious apartment on the outskirts of Beijing but keeps this place for its convenience. The building is tucked away in Beijing's Qianmen area -- a commerce center a century ago and currently a popular touristy pedestrian mall in central Beijing.
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Liu's inlaws lived inside this building before they passed away. The couple came from wealthy families and were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. This wedding photo, taken in the early 1940s and hanging on the wall of their room, is the only one that survived the Cultural Revolution, when a Western-style wedding photo would be destroyed because it was "bourgeois."
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After changing hands multiple times, the building's ownership is now unclear to residents. Because of this, residents say that an ongoing underground pipeline leakage has never been attended to by any institution or government body.
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"I never feel I live in a historical building; I'm only afraid that it would one day collapse," resident Xiao Xiaoxiao told CNN.
