Earthly fortresses.

These remarkable buildings in south China are communal fortresses housing large numbers of peasant families who work the surrounding land. The massive dwellings, constructed from rammed earth, reflect both a complex social network and the subtle Chinese art of geomancy.

The city of Xiamen (formerly Amoy) lies in the southern Chinese province of Fujian on the coast close to the island of Taiwan. Xiamen itself is an old colonial city with radically modified suburbs giving no hint of the magnificent buildings lying in the interior of the province. Within a day's drive (providing you have the right driver and a well serviced car) lie the beginnings of a landscape dominated by the rammed earth dwellings of the Hakka people.

The Hakka are a tribe sometimes known as 'the rootless vagabonds', the 'rabble-rousing hillbillies' or the 'guest bandits' by their neighbours.(1) Jonathan D. Spence notes that they were originally farmers from Jiangxi who drifted south from the turbulence of consistent wars in the north and eventually became known in neighbouring province of Guangdong as Hakkas. The name, when translated directly from the ideogram, refers to 'the guest people'. Possibly a guest in the sense that their ancestors had come from another part of China and no matter how long they stayed on the landscape, they would always be so labelled.

Among their notable feats, Hakka women were known for their strength as warriors. When the Quing government sent forces to quell the efforts of Hong Xiuquan who had declared himself the heavenly King of the Taiping Tiango, they met with defeat. A unique characteristic of the Hakka women was the fact that they were never forced to bind their feet. Another was their strength as farmers, tillers of the fields, caretakers of their households and protectors of the ancestral lands while their men roamed the countryside in search of part-time labour or scholarship if they were so inclined. It is even said that one Hakka woman could carry two loads while it took two Tanka women to carry one.(2)

The form of the buildings in many ways resembles the gasho-zukuri of the Shirakawa Valley in Japan (now almost extinct due to the building of dams) where households of exiles lived under one roof. As many as 20 families are known to have lived in the same complex with a master and mistress of the house occupying the main space on ground level together with all the women while the men were squeezed in one of the upper levels. The remaining layers of slatted flooring were covered with layers of munching silkworms which were heated from below in winter. The silk was used for paying taxes demanded by the city of Kyoto. Because the topography of the land to which these people were exiled was so steep, it was barely possible to produce enough rice to feed the mouths of the inhabitants let alone pay the taxes.

Like the gasho-zukuri, the Hakka houses appear as enormous man-made forms on a very limited part of a mountainous landscape, leaving as much land as possible for crop cultivation. Stories abound in China of US pilots identifying them in the 1950s and '60s as possible UFO sites.

There are in fact three basic types of dwelling: the large round dwelling, rectangular ones and a type known as the Phoenix dwelling. The Phoenix dwellings, such as the Dafudi in Yongding County, built in 1828, follow the Chinese principles of Confucian order most rigorously. The Dafudi building is 58 m in breadth and 108 m in depth with an entrance to the south through which one reaches a main hall of worship with very high ceilings in the centre of the complex, and furthest to the back, a section for the senior family members.

The rectangular and circular types, on the other hand, had to divide the area surrounding the courtyard with units of equal size. Seniors do not live in a building of their own, but are distributed among each of the units. These are divided into floors (from three to five depending on the house) with the kitchen on the main floor, grain storage on the second floor (above the heated ground floor to keep the grain dry) and bedrooms on top. In this type of housing, the elderly would have the lower floors while the younger generation would have upper ones: the hierarchy of the family was maintained vertically rather than by accommodating the old in an entirely separate block as in the Phoenix houses.

The largest of the rectangular houses in existence is the Xishuanglou house in Pinghe County built in the eighteenth century. It is said to have housed approximately 500 people or 90 families all bearing the family name Huang. In the outer perimeter of 69 units, each had a width of between three and four metres with an entry through a single-storied kitchen connected to the inner rooms by a narrow passageway at one side of the courtyard. The inner rooms received light from the courtyard: the living room faced the courtyard and the bedroom was against the outer wall of the complex. A small stair from the bedroom at the back of the unit led to the bedroom above.

The circular dwellings create a most remarkable impression on the landscape. From the top of a mountain path, not one but several of these monsters lies peaceful in a valley. In fact, the idea of great monsters may not be so far fetched as it sounds since the Chinese art of geomancy, known as Feng Shui (wind and water) treats the land, not as dead soil, or as we are prone to say in the West 'earth', but as part of a great living organism, a dragon, which must be placated by our intrusions on it.

These dwellings vary in size from quite small to the largest (82 m in diameter): the Longjianlou three-storied dwelling which has an outer ring of 50 bays. Exterior walls of this building are made of rammed earth 1.7 m thick. The exterior face of the walls is perfectly vertical while the inner face slopes outward as it goes upward, diminishing in size. In this particular dwelling, the ancestral hall occupies three bays of the standard unit on the ground and second floors at the opposite end of the axis running through the circle from the entrance to the south. The Chengqilou dwelling of Yangding County, built in 1709, is another example of an enormous circular dwelling which has housed as many as 80 families (more than 600 people) in units about the periphery with no trace of the feudal patriarchal distinctions which can be seen in Phoenix dwellings.

The oldest circular dwelling in the area is thought to be the Qiyunlou house in Hua'an County in the north of Fujian province. It is a smaller version of the circular dwelling originally built by the Guo family in 1371. It now houses 20 families (approximately 180 people). The portals follow the principle of geomancy by having a main gate to the south, an eastern gate known as 'the gate of life' for marriage ceremonies, and a western gate known as 'the gate of death' for funerals. There is no gate from the north whence comes the wind and the enemy.

The Huaiyuanlou dwelling in Nanjing County is probably one of the most common types of circular dwelling. Built in 1909, it is made up of 34 four-storey bays with four staircases distributed symmetrically around the circle giving 28 rooms a floor. The kitchen and the eating places are on the main floor with the heat from them going up to the second floor to keep the food, fodder, and storage dry. The second, third, and fourth floors are accessed from the stairway from an open corridor 1.2 m in width from the interior face of the building. In the centre of the dwelling space there is a series of concentric circles housing pigs and chickens and, in the very centre, the hall for ancestral worship. There is only one entrance to this compound, and that is through a gate measuring approximately 3 x 3 m. The gate is closed by two doors of solid planks 100 mm thick, covered with iron sheets against marauders. As well as the sturdy doors, there is a water trough above the door lintel, fed from above by bamboo pipes to form a water curtain in case of fire. Needless to say, the well is within the complex while the privy is on the exterior.

Exterior windows in most of the dwellings are small, sometimes only 50 x 70 mm on the third and fourth floors with small smoke outlets tilted up through the walls on the first floor so that they punctuate the outer surface of the building somewhere above the second floor. The fortresses were all but impenetrable from the outside.

To the best of the author's knowledge, the most thorough study to date of these houses has been done by a group of architects from Tokyo Geijyutsu University in Japan and if, in fact, there are more that 1000 circular dwellings in the area, there is much that can be documented before the credit card highways annihilate the harmonious existence of these quiet places. Indeed in some instances the cohesive family element has already begun to disintegrate. Spaces in the communal dwellings are now being rented out, as their original owners relocate to build individual houses in the landscape.

1 Blake, C. Fred, Ethnic Group and Social Change in a Chinese Market Town, Asian Studies Program, University of Hawaii Press, 1981, p49.

2 Ibid, p55.