Yongding Tulou trip

Ever since I moved to Xiamen, I wanted to make a trip to the famous Tulou villages which are spread over Fujian province. Tulou （土楼） is Chinese for earth building, and it refers to the main construction material of these large multi-storey buildings, usually circular or square in shape, with a large inner courtyard, which often contains several other buildings, sometimes organized in concentric rings. The outer walls are made of compacted earth, usually yellow in colour, and sometimes reinforced with bamboo or wood. The inner balconies are all wooden, and often you will find stone or brick dividing walls as well. Tulous have been build since the 12th century until the present (latest are build in the late 20th century), but the design has hardly changed. Many Tulous have four floors, but three and even five floor Tulous also exist. Their characteristic ring shape might have inspired the late Steve Jobs for the design of Apple's new headquarters.

I made the trip to Gaobei Tulou cluster in Yongding county, in eastern Fujian province, almost 4 hours by bus from Xiamen, together with Miao Qi, my good friend and journalist/photographer. We arrived in Gaobei village just after three o'clock in the afternoon, when the tour groups had already gone, so it was pleasantly quiet. The only problem was that it rained a lot, but we didn't let that spoil our trip. The cloudy weather actually created good conditions for photography, with soft shadows instead of the knock-out contrasts of a sunny day. The first building we explored was also one of the largest and oldest. Chengqilou （承啟樓） was build in 1709, has an outer diameter of 62.6 meters, with four floors, and four concentric rings within the inner courtyard surrounding the ancestral hall. The outer ring alone contains 288 rooms, and its massive earthen walls keep out heat in the summer, and isolate from the cold in winter. The main gate is surrounded by a large granite frame, and interiour stone walls divide the ring in four sections, each with their own wooden staircase.

Next to Chengqilou is the slightly smaller Qiaofulou （侨福楼）, where we spent the night in a simple room on the third (and top) floor (70 RMB for two). Qiaofulou has an open courtyard with some small trees, and a well. On the ground floor, one of the rooms was retro-fitted as a modern bathroom, with hot shower and flushing toilet.
A Tulou can house hundreds of people, but nowadays the number of residents are a bit lower. Still, most buildings are occupied by many families, usually belonging to the same clan. Some Tulous have been occupied by descendants of the same clan for tens of generations. In the evening we visited yet another Tulou, where we chatted with some of the residents. The Tulou community is really like a small village in itself, although many people (especially the younger generation) now also have a modern house in the village outside.

The second day we visited the nearby village Hongkeng, which is stretched along both sides of Nianxi Creek, a picturesque little river, with many Tulous, both circular and square, and a variety of other houses, temples and stone bridges crossing the river in many places, making it easy to zigzag from one Tulou to the next. This village is has developed into a tourist attraction, and features a large visitor center with parking lot for tour buses.Fortunately, this second day we arrived well before the tourist crowd, which only swarms out across the area between noon and three o'clock, being four hours away from the city of Xiamen (and even further from any other place worth mentioning).
The most famous Tulou in this area is  Zhenchenglou （振成楼）, build in 1912 by a wealthy tobacco farmer, and features a large ancestral hall in its courtyard flanked by Western style columns, and decorative iron railings on the second floor balcony. Hongkeng village has a wide variety of Tulous, all open for visitors, which makes it a very interesting cultural site to visit. Some of the buildings are listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites, as is Chengqilou in Gaobei village.