News & Events

Tulou, the Clay Castles of Hakka people in Fujian

By Lee Maoqing ( our tour operator and guide)

The hilly west of Xiamen to the valley of Dingjiang River floating from the north to the sea as the border with Guangdong, is the hometown of Hakka, the visitors if translated in Chinese. Here the humid, warm forestry mountain slopes host huge or small round or square castle-like buildings made of clay, of twenty thousand ones in Yongding county and fifteen thousand in Nanjing County, according to uncompleted statistics.
The building technic of the huge clusters of buildings is similar to the ancient great walls in the gobi desert of north and west China, which still practiced by the Tibetan people in Tibetan region. The original sticking clay is taken from the village nearby, the timber frame of wall is erected to fill in original clay, gravels, wood, hay, etc., crushed with trample.
It takes a couple of years for the whole clan to prepare the materials, and a year for hundreds of people to work together. The largest of which are three stories to five stories high, circular and house the whole clans.
The outside is plain with only clay and therefore almost not possible to climb. The huge wall encloses several floors with galleries all looking towards the open yard, or family shrine at the center. These galleries are vertically divided into sections separated by stairs. Each family owns a section between the two stairs. For the three-storied buildings, the top floor is bedroom but without private toilet. Bucket is put by the corridor for the night emergency. The public toilet is built outside the earth building, probably there was no toilet in the old days. The second floor is for grain barns, first floor is for eating and the meeting place.
In special occasions, the yard is a place for public celebrations, serves as dinning hall, or the opera stadium when a performance of puppet show.
The residents of of this region are known as Hakka, the visitors in Chinese, whose ancestors might immigrate as the army marched from the north to conquer the unknown territory in Tang Dynasty. Some anthropologists believed the time could be dated earlier, the Han or Qin Dynasty, of two thousand years ago. The local Hakka tells their accent belongs to the ancient accent in Hennan, the origin and the center of Han Chinese culture.
According to the census in 2018, around 1,200,000 Hakka residents inhabit in the eight counties of the southwest Fujian. The same population of Hakka are now living in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and the rest of the world.