Kaiping Diaolou (开平碉楼)

Why Go

A Remittance, Turned Into a Building

1. The architecture is a record of where the family went

Look at the top of any of these towers and you are looking at a list of places. A Roman arcade. A dome that would not be out of place on a mosque. A Baroque gable with scrolls and urns. Corinthian capitals, Portuguese balustrades, Gothic points, and on some of them a Chinese eave sitting on top of the lot. This is not an architect being eclectic. It is a builder working from what the man who paid for it had seen, described in letters, or brought home as a postcard or a page torn from a catalogue.

The money came from emigration on a scale that is hard to picture now. From the middle of the nineteenth century, men from this cluster of counties west of the delta went to California, to British Columbia, to Australia and to Southeast Asia, and a great many of the Chinese labourers who built railways and worked mines in North America came from exactly here. Immigration laws in the United States and Canada made it difficult or impossible to bring wives and children, so the men went alone, worked for decades, and sent money back to households that stayed in the village. The towers are what those remittances bought.

That is why the buildings feel strange in their landscape and also completely at home in it. The fields around them are ordinary Guangdong paddy, worked the ordinary way. The houses next door are ordinary grey-tiled village houses. And in the middle of that, a five-storey concrete tower with an Italian gallery on top, built by a family whose income was arriving from Vancouver.

2. It is also a bunker, and the details prove it

The word diaolou means blockhouse, and the fortification is not decorative. The lower storeys have small windows set in thick walls, each fitted with iron shutters that fold across the opening, and iron grilles behind them. Several of the pictures below show those shutters standing open, dark red against white render. The ground-floor door is iron. The upper corners carry round turrets corbelled out on brackets so that somebody inside can see and shoot along the face of the wall below, and one of the pictures shows a rooftop sentry box with narrow slits in its side walls.

The reason was banditry. In the decades around the fall of the Qing, the delta counties were badly policed and organised robbery was a business, and a household visibly receiving foreign money was an obvious target. A tower is a solution to that problem: put the valuables and the family above the ground floor, close the iron shutters, and wait. Some towers were built by several families together purely as a refuge and stood empty the rest of the time.

The result is the thing worth travelling for. The bottom of the building is grim and the top is a party: an open gallery with columns, a roof terrace with a balustrade, a domed pavilion for sitting in the evening. The same wall does defence below and pleasure above, and the join between them is visible from the field.

It is worth holding this against the Fujian Tulou, which solve the same problem the opposite way. There, one huge ring holds an entire clan behind a single wall. Here, each family built its own tower and they stand apart in the fields. One is a community that fortified itself collectively; the other is a set of households that each bought their own security with money from abroad.

Orientation

Clusters, Not a Site

There is no single place called Kaiping Diaolou. The towers are scattered across a rural county, and what is ticketed is a handful of village clusters plus one garden estate, each with its own gate and car park, several kilometres apart. The usual circuit takes in two or three of them: a cluster standing in open paddy, a village where the towers rise among ordinary houses, and the garden with the maintained mansion.

Between the ticketed clusters the same towers keep appearing at the roadside, locked and unvisited, which is the best part of the day. Anyone with a car and an afternoon should drive the lanes rather than move between car parks.

Context

The Counties That Emptied

Kaiping belongs to a small group of counties west of the Pearl River Delta which, for about a century, exported people. The reasons were ordinary: crowded land, a run of bad decades in the nineteenth century, and news from across the Pacific that there was work. The consequence was that a very large share of the Chinese population of North America, Australia and Southeast Asia before the Second World War traced back to this handful of counties, and that the dialect of Chinatowns in San Francisco and Vancouver for generations was the speech of these villages rather than Mandarin or standard Cantonese.

What made the money flow back rather than the families flow out was law. Exclusion acts and head taxes in North America made it expensive or impossible for a labourer to bring a wife, so households were split by an ocean for decades at a time: the man abroad, the wife and children in the village, and a remittance arriving through a network of clan associations and letter-carriers that worked with impressive reliability. The towers are the physical residue of that arrangement, and so is the fact that so many of them are empty now.

They emptied twice. The first time was the middle of the twentieth century, when the border closed, the remittances stopped and the families who could leave did. The second is ordinary rural depopulation, which is happening across China and is visible in any of these villages. The towers survived because concrete is durable and because nobody had a use for the land they stand on. That is a plainer reason than heritage value, and it is the real one.

Where to Base

Jiangmen (江门)

Jiangmen is the prefecture city and the practical base, with high-speed rail from Guangzhou and hotels at ordinary prices. It also has a museum of the overseas Chinese that is worth an hour before going out to the towers, because it supplies the half of the story the buildings cannot.

Guangzhou is two hours away and a day trip is possible, but it wastes four hours on the road and forces the clusters into a rush. A night in Jiangmen or Kaiping turns this into a comfortable day of driving between villages.