Clan citadels turn into ghost villages

THE gargantuan buildings are so iconic that they appear on a Chinese stamp. The most famous have distinctive round shapes, appearing from a distance like flying saucers that have plopped down in the middle of farm fields. Some were reportedly mistaken for missile silos by American officials poring over satellite images.

But the thousands of "earthen buildings", built by the ethnic Hakka and Minnan people of rural Fujian Province, are the ultimate architectural expression of clan existence in China.

For centuries, each building, called a tulou in Mandarin Chinese, would house an entire clan, virtually a village. Everyone living inside would have the same surname, except for those who had married into the clan. The tulou usually tower four floors and can have hundreds of rooms that open out on to a vast central courtyard, like the Colosseum.

The outer walls, made of rammed earth, protected against bandits. With stockpiles of food, people could live for months without setting foot outside the tulou.

But as the clan traditions of China dwindle, more and more people are moving out of the tulou to live in modern apartments with conveniences absent from the earthen buildings - indoor toilets, for example.

The construction of tulou ended last century. The art of building them is fading, but the United Nations is seeking to shield those that survive from the ravages of time. Some scholars contend that Chinese officials - though they promote the tulou as tourist attractions, and President Hu Jintao visited them during the 2010 Lunar New Year festivities - have done little to systematically preserve the buildings or modernise them so people will continue living in them.

"People don't clean it any more," said Jiang Qing, 28, as she stood on an upper balcony in Huan Xing tulou, whose name means "embracing prosperity." "As long as people live here, the ecosystem thrives. Once people move out, then it all falls apart."

Huan Xing is a typical tulou, one of many in Yongding County. It is 500 years old. Chickens saunter across the grounds. Wooden pillars along the balconies were erected long ago at leaning angles to give the structure greater strength.

The tulou once housed 100 families, but only ten or so people live here now. The elderly residents shuffle back and forth, cooking in kitchens on the first floor or sitting around the central courtyard chatting. The young have all moved out. Many live two hours away in the coastal city of Xiamen, where they largely do menial work.

Jiang, the mother of a three-year-old child, moved here from another village when she married into the Li clan.But she and her husband recently moved out of Huan Xing to an apartment with running water and indoor plumbing. "People used to live in the tulou for safety, but that's not needed any more," said her husband, Li Jingan, 28, a restaurant owner.

Unesco, the UN agency that oversees cultural preservation, declared 46 tulou together to be a World Heritage Site in 2008. There are estimated to be 30,000 tulou in Fujian Province, more than 20,000 of those in Yongding County.

Huang Hanmin, a scholar of the tulou who lives in Fujian, said it was a myth that the tulou were all built by the Hakka, called kejiaren in Mandarin Chinese, meaning "guest people." They are called guests because they began migrating to southern China from the Yellow River basin in the fourth century to escape war and natural disasters.

Many of the Hakka settled in Fujian and Guangdong Provinces and in the hilly terrain of Fujian, rife with bandits hostile to the "guests," they built the tulou. But Huang said that their counterparts there, who mostly speak a language called Minnan, also constructed many tulou for security.

Chinese officials tried smashing the clan system during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. However, collectives built more and more tulou and randomly assigned people to live in the buildings, so that each clan would have members spread among different collectives. When the Cultural Revolution ended, people drifted back to their clans.

Perhaps the most famous tulou is the 17th-century Chengqi Lou, which has striking concentric rings of homes and alleys on its ground floor and was visited by Hu last year at the start of the Lunar New Year. Its diameter is almost as long as a football field, and it has 402 rooms. Fifteen generations have lived in it. Four brothers together oversaw building of the Chengqi Lou for their families; it took four years to build, one year for each floor.

In the centre is an ancestral altar, which is common to tulou. The inner ring of buildings once housed classrooms. Now children go outside for school. The next ring has 36 meeting rooms. The outermost ring is the main residential section of the tulou. That ring's towering walls have kitchens and animal stalls on the ground floor, storage rooms on the second and homes on the third and fourth floors.