Tulou-Hopping in W. Fujian

Update: If you’re planning a trip, check out my guide to visiting the tulou for detailed transportation and lodging information (3/29/2010).

Imagine sharing a house with your parents, your siblings, your best friend, and every one of your snotty cousins — not to mention all of their parents, grandparents, and so on. For the Hakka people of Fujian Province, this was once (and for some, continues to be) life. For centuries, instead of individual houses, Hakka clans built giant tulou to house all of their members. While the upper floors of a tulou (土楼) are divided into separate rooms for individual families, the ground level is common space. All of the cooking facilities are located in the public courtyard, to minimize the risk of fire in the wood-and-earth structures. Life in the tulou revolves — literally — around an altar dedicated to the clan’s ancestors, usually located at the center of the courtyard or immediately opposite the tulou entrance.

Inside Chengqi Lou, the "King of the Tulou"

Even as younger members of the Hakka ethnic minority are forsaking the tulou for more modern apartments, the buildings are growing as a tourist destination. (They were named a World Heritage Site in 2008.) Clusters of tulou, dating from as far back as the 1500s or as recent as the 1960s, are scattered throughout western Fujian, concentrated in Yongding County. They can be visited as a hasty day trip or as an overnight excursion from the coastal city of Xiamen (once known as Amoy). Satisfying a year-old desire, some friends and I hopped a flight to Xiamen this weekend, and from there took a bus straight to the heart of the tulou region.

The five tulou of the Tianloukeng cluster have three different shapes: square, round and oval.

We were deposited near the Hongkeng tulou cluster, whose nearest town is now full of hotels and restaurants. But we wanted to find a room in a real tulou. Our hopes were answered when an aggressive hotel manager offered us a room in the nearby Huanxing Lou. Unlike most of the tulou we would visit later that day, Huanxing Lou is in no way gussied up for tourism. There was no one hawking local tea or miniature replicas of tulous, just women running to and fro with the chickens and rabbits who were to become that night’s dinner. After visiting Zhencheng Lou and its neighbors, which were inundated with tour groups, we were happy to return to Huanxing Lou and check into our very, very basic digs. There was no running water and the beds were little more than wooden boards covered with a blanket, but then it cost a mere 40 RMB per night, or less than $2 each for three people.

These adorable piglets were some of our neighbors in Huanxing Lou.

The next day, we hired a car to take us to some of the further tulou areas. The Gaobei cluster boasts the “King of the Tulous,” so named because it has the largest number of concentric rings of buildings inside. At the Tianluokeng cluster, a viewing platform perched in the mountains gives you a clear view of five giant tulous — three circular, one square and one oval — nestled into the terraced mountains. Despite the busloads of tourists in the vicinity, the smaller tulous were still almost empty. Empty, that is, except for the occasional group of mahjiang players, a cook plucking a locally-raised duck, a napping cat, and laundry flapping in the breeze — proof that tourism aside, life continues inside these magnificent buildings.

Laundry dries in the breeze on the top floor of one of western Fujian's tulou.

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2. Gulang Yu: A Slice of Europe in China
3. A Tibetan Experience in Jiuzhaigou
4. The Potala Palace, in Miniature
5. What Makes an “Old Town” Old?

Tagged as: blogsherpa, China, Fujian, off the beaten path, tulou, Yongding