Fujian · Villages That Are One Building
Fujian Tulou (福建土楼)
Rammed-earth apartment blocks built for whole clans, three to five storeys around an open courtyard, with one door and no windows low down. Several hundred of them are still lived in.
Quick Facts
The Short Version
| What it is | Large communal houses of rammed earth, usually round or square, each built to hold an entire lineage with its ancestral hall in the middle |
|---|---|
| Where | The mountains of southwestern Fujian: Yongding county near Longyan, and Nanjing and Hua’an counties near Zhangzhou |
| Listed | UNESCO inscribed 46 of them across ten sites in 2008 |
| Who built them | Two different peoples. The Yongding cluster is Hakka; the Nanjing and Hua’an clusters are Minnan. English writing usually calls all of them Hakka, which is wrong |
| How they work | Each family owns a vertical slice from ground floor to roof, not a floor. Kitchens at the bottom, storage above, bedrooms at the top |
| Booking | Each cluster is ticketed separately. Buy at the gate. Book beds inside a tulou ahead in season |
| Time needed | A full day for one cluster. Two days to see both a Hakka and a Minnan one |
| Getting there | Three to four hours by road from Xiamen, or under two from Longyan |
Why Go
One Building, One Clan, One Door
1. The structure is the social arrangement
A tulou is a single building that houses a whole lineage. The wall is rammed earth, up to two metres thick at the base, tapering as it rises, with a timber frame carrying the galleries inside. There is one gate. The lower floors have no external windows at all, and the small openings higher up are defensive rather than for light. Everything faces inward onto the courtyard, where the ancestral hall stands.
The division of space is the part that surprises people. Families do not take a floor each; they take a wedge running from the ground to the roof, so every household has a kitchen at the bottom, a store above it and bedrooms at the top. Every family therefore gets the same mix of good and bad space, which is a deliberate answer to the question of how to divide a building among relatives without anyone getting the worse end of it.
2. Two peoples, not one
The Yongding cluster around Longyan was built by Hakka, who moved south into these mountains over several migrations and were often in conflict with the people already there. The Nanjing and Hua’an clusters nearer Zhangzhou were built by Minnan speakers, who are not Hakka and whose ancestors were among those earlier arrivals.
The buildings look similar and the reason for them was similar, which is why the distinction gets flattened in English writing. It matters on the ground: the languages are mutually unintelligible, the food differs, and the two clusters feel different to visit.
The catch. Some tulou are museums with ticket desks and souvenir stalls in the courtyard, and some are ordinary buildings where several dozen people live and hang their washing. Both are worth seeing and they are not the same experience. Ask which you are being taken to, because a day of only the first is a day of walking through gift shops.
Orientation
Which Cluster, and How Many
The sites are spread over three counties and no single ticket covers them. The usual choices are Hongkeng and Chuxi in Yongding on the Hakka side, and Tianluokeng and Yunshuiyao in Nanjing on the Minnan side. Tianluokeng is the group of four round buildings and one square one seen from the road above, which is the photograph most people arrive wanting.
One cluster is a full day including the drive. Two clusters means staying a night, and staying inside a tulou is the reason to do it: the building empties of visitors in the evening and what is left is a courtyard with families in it.
Practical
Things Worth Knowing
Stay the night inside one
Rooms in working tulou are basic, cheap and the whole point. The buildings are completely different after the last bus leaves.
Go up the hill for the cluster view
The famous view of Tianluokeng is from a roadside platform above it, not from inside. Make sure the itinerary includes the stop rather than only the buildings.
It rains here
These are wet mountains and the courtyards have no cover. The tiled galleries are the only shelter and they are narrow.
Ask before entering a home
Doors off the galleries are front doors. The courtyard and the ground floor are public in practice; the upper levels are not.
Timing
When to Go
| Season | The case for | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| October to November | The most settled weather of the year and comfortable for walking between buildings | The first week of October is the national holiday and the clusters fill |
| March to May | Green terraces, rice going in, and the valleys at their best | The wet season. Persistent rain rather than showers |
| June to September | Everything open and the fields worked | Hot, humid, and the typhoon window runs through late summer |
| December to February | Quiet, and the buildings belong to the people who live in them | Cold and damp inside. Tulou have no heating of any kind |
Context
Why Anyone Built Like This
Southwestern Fujian is steep, remote and was for a long time beyond effective government reach. Lineages that moved into it had to defend themselves, and a single large building with one gate was the answer: it could hold a clan, its stores and its animals, and it could be shut. Feuding between lineages over land and water was common enough that this was a practical rather than a theoretical concern.
Rammed earth was the available material. Walls were built up in lifts inside timber shuttering, using local soil mixed with lime, sand and sometimes glutinous rice, and they have proved durable enough that buildings from several centuries ago are still occupied. The earliest survivors date to the Ming period; most of the well-known ones are Qing or later.
UNESCO inscribed forty-six of them in 2008, which changed the economics. Some buildings now carry a ticket price and a stall in the courtyard, some households have moved out to modern houses nearby, and some clusters have stayed largely residential. All three outcomes are visible within a day’s drive of each other.
Nearby
Other Stops on the Same Trip
City · 3 hr east
Xiamen (厦门)
The coastal city most visitors arrive from, with the colonial-era island of Gulangyu offshore.
City · 2 hr north
Longyan (龙岩)
The nearest city to the Yongding cluster, and the practical base if you are coming by rail rather than from the coast.
Cluster · same trip
Yunshuiyao (云水谣)
A village in Nanjing county with old banyans along a stream and tulou among the houses, used as a film location and busier for it.
Where to Base
Xiamen (厦门)
Most foreign visitors reach the tulou from Xiamen, which has the airport and the international connections, and it is three to four hours each way by road. That makes a day trip long and an overnight much better.
Longyan is closer to the Yongding cluster and is on the rail network, so coming by train and basing there is the more efficient route if the tulou are the point of the trip rather than an excursion from the coast.
Experiences
What You Can Actually Do Here
On site · 2 hr
Inside a working tulou
The courtyard, the ancestral hall, the galleries and the kitchens, in a building people still live in rather than one converted to a museum.
Overnight · 1 night
Sleep in one
Basic rooms off the gallery. The building after dark, with the day visitors gone, is the version worth having come for.
Guided · 2 days
Hakka and Minnan, both
One cluster in each, with someone who can explain why two peoples who do not speak the same language built the same answer to the same problem.
Worth two days and worth staying inside one. A day trip from Xiamen is six to eight hours in a car for a few hours of buildings, and it is the version most people do and then describe as fine. Pick one Hakka cluster and one Minnan cluster, and make sure at least one of them is still residential.
Plan a Fujian Route That Includes the Tulou
Tell us your dates and what you are after, and our local team will build the route: a Hakka cluster and a Minnan one, a night inside a working tulou, and Xiamen and the coast on either side of it.