Interior walls of a round Tulou
Getting out to Hakka country wasn’t nearly as simple as my previous stops. I boarded an overnight train from Guangzhou. The train was packed with people of all professions and ages visiting relatives during the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year). I shared my ‘sleeping cabin’ with a couple and their young child who were heading to the Fujian coast to visit the wife’s parents. However, I bade them farewell about halfway through their journey, at around 3:30am, and groggily climbed out of the train and into Hakka country. After a few hour nap in a surprisingly luxurious hotel for podunk Fujian(a city by the name of Longyan), I bussed it up to Yongding, heart of the land of Hakka.
The Hakka are one of China’s 55 official ethnic minorities. They are said to have migrated down from Central Asia to the Southern coastal region untold centuries ago, but they have maintained their cultural identity through rural isolation, and even further developed a number of unique customs. The Hakka may also possibly be the most influential ethnic group in Modern China after the Han, and are responsible for some of China’s most influential leaders. One of the coolest Hakka historical figures was Hong Xiuquan, a 19th century Christian scholar and revolutionary who led the Taiping rebellion, and for a short time, established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom that expanded across one third of China’s territory and represented a unique syncreticism of Chinese celestial theology and Christian beliefs stemming from St. Augustine’s City of God. (read more about this fascinating episode in Chinese history here) Other Hakka hard hitters include none other than China’s liberator from the Imperial yoke Sun Yat Sen and architect of China’s economic transformation Deng Xiao Ping. However, I didn’t actually know any of this till after I arrived in Hakka country. What drew me there were their curious and wonderful traditional homes, the Tulou. Below is a pan shot across the largest Tulou in the world, the guide lit called it the ‘King Tulou.’
Tulou are part apartment complex, part fortress, and part mall. The Hakka were driven to create these ingenious dwellings due to frequent political instability and banditry that preyed on this vulnerable minority people. Most Tulou are round and are often called roundhouses, however many Tulou, especially smaller structures are square. Tulou literally means earthen or mud building, and the construction techniques are supposedly somewhat impressive. Many Tulou are still inhabited and are in varying conditions from state supported tourist zones boasting gleaming refurbishments to crumbling remains housing a stray chicken or two. The Tulou that I stayed in was somewhere between the two extremes. It was just outside a tourist zone, and so benefited from high levels of foot traffic, but also remained quite authentic. There weren’t any tourist trinket vendors, this Tulou was strictly residential and let out a few rooms to backpackers for some extra cash. I happened to be the only nonresident that evening, and was even lucky enough to join the 100 or so residents for some evening village theater.
This was an afternoon performance of the Hakka theater. I took a bunch more videos but this snippet is enough to get the general feel. It was a very relaxed setting. Reminds me of pre-Wagnerian opera and theater, before the lights got turned off, before performance became sacred. Theater in the Tulou was a community affair with people eating, children playing, old women gossiping, and actors walking on and off the front of the stage.
I stumbled onto this guy in one of the more touristic Tulou complexes. He was demonstrating his ability to essentially turn anything into a kind of double reed instrument (such as an obo). He played pieces of paper, and other odds and ends of all kinds. Here he is showing off his skill with a dried and salted fish…definitely the first time I had seen that used as an instrument.
The following day I rode down through the valley on the back of a Tulou-mate’s motorbike. He took me through a bunch of villages and I ended up seeing as many Tulou as I could possibly handle. I particularly liked the village on a creek and the give Tulou clustered on a hill, but there were many others. The while valley was flooded with Chinese tourists. It was the middle of the week so perhaps they had already completed their filial duties and were off on holiday. Or perhaps these were Westernized Chinese who weren’t interested in the old traditions and skipped the family visits altogether. Whatever the case may be, even though it was the most rural and remote part of my trip, I somehow felt more oppressed by the crush of people, even compared to the densely packed urban neighborhoods in Hong Kong. I think it was the unexpected incongruity of it all that caused this slightly negative reaction. But crowds are an essential part of tourism in China, especially during major official holidays. Anyway, a few extra camera flashes could do little to detract from the magnificence o the Tulou.
Below is a slideshow of some pics I took while out among the Tulou…
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