Fujian Tulou

The Fujian tulou are large, fortified communal earthen buildings built by the Hakka and neighboring Minnan people in the mountainous inland regions of Fujian Province, China, mostly between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. Built from rammed earth walls up to two meters thick, reinforced internally with bamboo or wood strips and capped with tiled roofs, the buildings are typically circular or rectangular in plan, three to five stories tall, and enclose a communal courtyard used for shared wells, ancestral halls and livestock, historically housing an entire extended clan of several hundred people under one roof for both daily life and defense. Their thick windowless outer walls and single guarded gate reflect origins in periods of regional banditry and clan warfare. In 2008 UNESCO inscribed forty six of the surviving tulou across three counties as a World Heritage Site, citing them as an exceptional building tradition fusing defense, communal living and Fengshui belief.