Kaiping Diaolou: Guangdong’s Fortified Towers and Emigrant Villages

Across the rice fields of Kaiping, in Guangdong province in southern China, about 1,800 fortified tower-houses rise above the villages. Known as diaolou, they mix Chinese building traditions with columns, domes and balconies brought home from North America and beyond by emigrants, and in 2007 twenty of the finest were inscribed by UNESCO as the World Heritage site Kaiping Diaolou and Villages.

What are the Kaiping diaolou?

A diaolou is a multi-storey defensive village house. The tradition began in the Ming period, in the 16th century, as a response to local banditry, and it reached its peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Builders worked in stone, rammed earth (pisé), green brick and, in the later towers, reinforced concrete.

The towers come in three main types, and UNESCO counts the survivors of each:

• Residential towers (1,149): fortified homes built by wealthy families, where daily life and defence shared the same walls.
• Communal towers (473): built jointly by several families as temporary refuges when raiders came.
• Watch towers (221): the latest type, used to keep a lookout over the surrounding villages and fields.

Look at a tower from bottom to top and the logic becomes clear. The lower storeys have thick walls and small, often barred openings; the upper floors carry the display, with loggias, corner turrets, balustrades and ornamental gables.

Emigrant wealth and Western styles

Kaiping was a major source of emigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Emigrants from these villages helped build economies in South Asia, Australasia and North America and sent money home. Their wealth paid for the most ambitious towers, and it also made the villages a target for bandits, which is why families built upwards and fortified their homes.

Returning emigrants brought architectural ideas with them. The result is a striking fusion of Chinese and Western structural and decorative forms, set in what UNESCO describes as a harmonious relationship with the surrounding farmland.

The World Heritage site

UNESCO inscribed Kaiping Diaolou and Villages in 2007 under criteria (ii), (iii) and (iv). It is a serial property: twenty diaolou in four groups, covering about 372 hectares, with a buffer zone of more than 2,700 hectares. All the diaolou have been protected as national monuments in China since 2001, and a management plan has been in place since 2005.

The inscribed towers are only a small share of the roughly 1,800 still standing across the area, and many more can be seen across the surrounding countryside.

Visiting Kaiping: practical tips

• Where to go: Zili village and Majianglong are among the best-known tower clusters; each rewards a few hours on foot.
• Climb inside: where a tower is open, the upper floors give the best view of the villages, ponds and fields, but stairs are often narrow and steep.
• Look at the setting: the towers make most sense alongside the lower village houses, fish ponds and paddy fields around them.
• Respect residents: these are living villages, so keep to open buildings and paths.

For another Chinese town whose layout tells a story, our Zhouzhuang guide follows canals and bridges in Jiangsu. For contemporary architecture with a green twist, see Milan’s Bosco Verticale.

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