Fujian Tulou (Yongding)

The story

The Hakka, "guest families", were Chinese who had moved south over many centuries and settled in the hills where Fujian, Guangdong and Jiangxi meet. Bandits and feuds made the hills dangerous, so from the 12th century on, and above all from the 16th to the 20th, families built their homes as fortresses: an outer wall of rammed earth up to two metres thick at the base, with all the rooms facing inward on a shared courtyard.

Each family had rooms stacked from ground to roof: kitchen below, granary above, bedrooms at the top. In the middle stood the ancestral hall. In 2008 forty-six of these buildings, in six clusters and four single buildings across Yongding, Nanjing and Hua'an counties, were listed together as a World Heritage Site.

What is here

Each cluster has its own ticket, sold at its visitor centre and on the scenic area's mini-program; we found no reliable 2026 prices to give here.

If you have one minute

In the courtyard of Chengqi Lou

Chengqi Lou, the "king of the tulou", took the Jiang family eighty years to finish, from 1628 to 1709. Four rings stand one inside another: the outer ring four storeys high with 72 rooms on each floor, the inner rings lower, and the ancestral hall at the centre. Some four hundred rooms in all, and in its fullest days more than eight hundred people.

Stand by the hall and turn slowly: the rings of roofs and wooden galleries close round you, and above is a circle of sky. The animated film "Big Fish & Begonia" (2016) set its story in round earthen houses modelled on buildings like this one: look straight up from the courtyard and you have a film-still shot of your own.

Things people often get wrong

"All tulou are round." Most are square or rectangular; the round ones are rarer and more famous.

"They are museums." Many are still homes. Shops on the ground floor are run by the families who live upstairs.

People who stood here

We searched Chinese sources first for this list, then English ones.

• Lin Xunzhi (merchant, early 20th century)A tobacco-knife merchant of the Lin family of Hongkeng, he led the building of Zhencheng Lou from 1912 to 1917, mixing a Bagua plan with Western columns.
• Li Yuanhong (president of the Republic, 1864–1928)He sent calligraphy that hangs in Zhencheng Lou, honouring the family's good name.
• Hu Wenhu (businessman, 1882–1954)The "Tiger Balm king" of Southeast Asia came from a Hakka family of Zhongchuan village in Yongding, one of the tulou villages, and gave money for schools at home.

Go deeper: three clusters of Yongding and their great buildings, six stops7 stops · about 1 min to read

The clusters are spread over valleys an hour or more apart; a car or a day tour from Xiamen or Longyan is the easiest way. Stay a night in a tulou if you can.

1. Hongkeng and Zhencheng Lou

A stream valley lined with over a hundred tulou of the Lin family. Zhencheng Lou, the "prince of the tulou", divides its rings into eight sections like the eight trigrams, with fire walls between them, and has Western columns round its ancestral hall.

2. The Tianhou temple

Villages built temples as well as homes; this one honours Mazu, the sea goddess, carried inland by traders.

3. Gaobei and Chengqi Lou

The king of the tulou and its neighbours. Climb to the upper gallery to look down on the rings.

4. Chuxi

Five round and dozens of square buildings in a terraced valley, among them Jiqing Lou of 1419, one of the oldest round tulou, with 72 separate staircases, one for each household.

5. The Tianluokeng cluster

Across the county line in Nanjing, Zhangzhou, a square building ringed by four round ones, seen from above as "four dishes and a soup".

6. Huaiyuan Lou

A well-kept round building of 1905–1909 in Nanjing, with a school hall in its courtyard.

The tulou and the same years elsewhere

Jiqing Lou was finished in 1419; that year in Prague, crowds threw the town councillors out of a window, beginning the Hussite wars.