Chinese rally to defend great towers

Published on Saturday 5 December 2009 18:52

AN APPEAL has gone out to the expat Chinese community to help secure the future of some of the country's most unlikely historic buildings.

For China's architectural heritage includes many western-style houses based on European medieval castles and towers.

Thousands of towers rise from the rice fields of Taishan in western China, in a tableau that is more Tuscan countryside than Chinese landscape.

It is a sight found nowhere else in the country. Rectangular towers, some made of concrete, some built of stone or other materials, jutting four or five stories high from the flatlands.

They have balconies and turrets and Roman-style arches. There are metal shutters to deter criminals and portholes where defenders can take aim at assailants, explaining why the locals call these buildings pao lou or cannon towers.

So common are the towers that until just a few decades ago, virtually every town in this fertile patch of Guangdong province, just west of Hong Kong, had one.

Most were built in the early 20th century by overseas Chinese who returned from abroad with newfound wealth and an abiding fear of being parted from their riches by bandits. So up went the fortress towers, an architectural amalgamation of Chinese mansion and European fortress.

But now the towers, built to withstand raids and storms, are crumbling, left to rot by the overseas Chinese families, forgotten relics of a bygone age.

"It's the responsibility of the overseas Chinese to donate these to the country," said Cai Hetian, director of the museum in Taishan and an advocate for the preservation of the towers. "These are falling apart, and they're potentially dangerous."

Cai said that, since the 1950s, about 3,000 towers have crumbled or been destroyed in Taishan, leaving 2,000 standing today. Barely any of the oldest ones – village guard towers made of mud and earth and dating from the late Qing dynasty, which ended in 1911 – remain.

Also in danger of disintegrating, or being torn down, are European-style market arcades across the region, and thousands of multi-storey villas called yang lou, or foreign buildings, built as fortified homes by returning Chinese.

Like the towers, they incorporate such European architectural elements as upper-floor balconies with arched porticoes, but also have distinctively Chinese features, like niches for family altars.

For much of the 20th century, this poor area of China was also, paradoxically, one of the most cosmopolitan regions of the country. It was the point of origin for many Chinese who emigrated overseas and settled in Chinatowns around the world, working in restaurants and on railroad projects.

"Taishan is a little bit freakish, from the speech of people here to the way they do things to the way they dress," Cai said, referring to the inescapable mix of East and West.

But Taishan is depopulating, as families continue emigrating to join their relatives or settle in large Chinese cities such as Guangzhou. Taishan now has about 900,000 people, a drop of 10 per cent since the 1990s.

In Miaobian, a peasant family has moved into a three-storey villa built 80 years ago by a rich relative. Ringed by palm trees, elements of the house could be described as Victorian, Georgian or Edwardian rather than Chinese. It has bay windows, cathedral ceilings and a balustrade along the wide staircase leading to the front door.

"I've lived here ten years," said Wen Weihui, 58, as he stir-fried vegetables in a wok in the villa's basement. "It's my family that built this. The original owner died in America."

Wen moved in with his wife and adult son after the previous occupants left for the United States. His family once lived in a cramped, single-storey house. "Of course, this is better," he said. But they have done little upkeep; some windows remain shattered, and dirt is smeared over the walls.

The house is one in a row of five villas built by members of the Wen family. Cai said they were among the most beautiful yang lou in Taishan. The one next door is grander but empty and derelict. "There should be maintenance work done here, but we can't contact the owners," Cai said.

The owners live in Hong Kong and have not put any money into preserving the home, he said. But neither are they willing to turn it over to the local government.

Here and there, as in nearby Pingzhou, evidence of restoration efforts can be seen. Bamboo scaffolding covers the two towers, and ancestral halls are covered in fresh paint.

There is no real estate market for the towers and villas, so it is hard to estimate their financial worth. But some people are recognising their aesthetic value. In the farm region of Kaiping, next to Taishan, where about 1,800 towers survive, officials applied to the United Nations in 2001 for listing as a Unesco World Heritage site. The application was approved in 2007, spurring preservation efforts.

There, in the village of Zili, management of the towers – called diao lou, or fortresses, by the locals – has been turned over to the government. Families have donated heirlooms – old trunks, bed frames, wooden chairs – to turn the buildings into mini-museums. The towers, the Unesco website says, "display a complex and flamboyant fusion of Chinese and Western structural and decorative forms" and retain "a harmonious relationship with the surrounding landscape".