BEHIND the tall building around the corner of Weihai Lu, an ancient-style castle is hidden from view. Few know when it was built, but now, ivy has covered the whole structure.

With its finely carved stonework and arched colonnades, this old building still possesses all the majesty of the middle ages.

Today, it is the location of the Minli Middle School but 80 years ago, it was the home of tigers, snakes and crocodiles.

The owner of the castle was Qiu Beishan, whose ancestors once lived as fisherfolk on Weishan Lake in East China's Shandong Province and his remote ancestors were said to be heroes in the style of a Chinese Robin Hood.

At the end of the 19th century, the poor life they were living compelled Qiu Beishan and his brother Qiu Weiqing to leave their hometown.

They found work in a German paint factory in Shanghai just as World War I broke out.

The German boss decided to return home and he sold the paint stockpiled in the factory to the Qiu brothers at a very low price.

The war completely disrupted all trade by sea and overnight the price of the paint that the Qiu brothers now owned skyrocketed and they were wealthy men.

With the profits they made during the war the two brothers built their castle and set up their own paint factory which they called, Guang Da Yuan. They also bought 10mu (0.67ha) of land on which they built two residential buildings for themselves - one was demolished after China's Liberation in 1949.

In spite of the wealthy urban life they were now living in Shanghai, they still missed the old days when they lived among lakes and mountains. So, by the early 1930s, they were keeping tigers, snakes and pangolins in the garden. Next, they built a large pond and stocked it with crocodiles. On the bank of the pond, was a huge pigeon house for 2,000 pigeons.

Every morning when the pigeons were released, it was said they covered the sky over Weihai Lu.

In the 1940s, the Qiu family rented their house to the Minli Middle School as a schoolhouse and the animals had to be sold or sent away. But the fate of the 2,000 pigeons was the most pitiful - most became dinner for the hungry Shanghainese of the war years.