Kaiping Diaolou and Villages

Across the flat farmland of Kaiping, in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong, rise hundreds of tall fortified towers that look as if they had wandered in from several continents at once. These are the diaolou: multi-storey defensive houses, closed and fortress-like below, that burst at the top into an extravagant crown of balconies, columns, domes and roofs mixing Chinese and Western forms with complete freedom. At their peak in the 1920s and 1930s there were more than 3,000; around 1,800 still stand, scattered through the villages of the county.

They are the architecture of emigration. From the nineteenth century huge numbers of men from Kaiping went to work in North America, Southeast Asia and Australia, and the money they sent home made the county's families rich enough to attract bandits. Families and whole villages answered by building towers: some communal refuges where villagers could shelter, some residential towers for a single wealthy family, some lookout posts. Returning migrants brought back Western ideas of what a grand house should look like, and local builders combined them with Chinese tradition, mostly in reinforced concrete. The oldest surviving tower, Yinglong Lou, is a far plainer three-storey building of the Ming dynasty, about 11.4 m high; the tallest, Ruishi Lou, built in 1921, has nine floors topped by a Byzantine-style roof and a Roman dome.

In 2007 four groups of villages and towers were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List: Sanmenli, Zili village, Majianglong and Jinjiangli. Each group shows the towers in the setting they were built for: ordinary villages, with houses, lanes and fields, above which the diaolou rise like watchmen. The towers have also served as a film set, most famously for Let the Bullets Fly (2010). What makes the place so compelling is exactly this ordinariness around them: eccentric, half-foreign skyscrapers standing in a farming landscape, telling the story of a whole region that lived between two worlds.

Getting there

The towers are spread across the countryside around Kaiping, in Guangdong province; the heritage villages lie roughly 20 km from the city centre. Zhuhai Jinwan Airport (ZUH) is about 93 km away; Guangzhou's airport is the more common gateway. Buses run from Guangzhou to Kaiping in about two hours, and high-speed trains serve Kaiping South station; from the bus station in Kaiping local buses go to the Zili and Majianglong scenic areas. Tangkou town, about 2 km from Zili, is the usual base for staying overnight.