Nanjing or Yongding: which Tulou should you visit?

What you are choosing between

A tulou is a fortified communal house. Thick outer walls of rammed earth, three to five storeys high, enclose a courtyard, with rooms for dozens of related families stacked in rings around it. They were built from roughly the 15th century to the 20th, some round, many square. UNESCO describes the largest as housing up to 800 people.

The inscribed buildings fall into ten sites. Visitors go to two groups of them, in neighbouring counties.

Nanjing county

Tianluokeng

Five buildings on a hillside: one square, three round, one oval, arranged so neatly that the group is nicknamed “four dishes and one soup”. The square one in the middle dates from 1796. The others were added between the 1930s and 1966. You look down on them from a viewing platform above the road, and this is the picture on the cover of every book about the Tulou. Then you walk down and go inside.

Yuchang Lou

A few kilometres on. A five-storey round building, about seven centuries old by local tradition, whose interior posts lean alarmingly: one way on the third and fourth floors, the other way on the fifth, by as much as fifteen degrees. It has stood like that for a very long time.

Taxia

A village strung along both banks of a stream, with tulou and ordinary houses mixed together and stone bridges between them. It is on the same ticket as Tianluokeng and is the usual place to stop for lunch or the night.

Yunshuiyao

Half an hour away, on a different river. An old cobbled path runs under huge banyans past a water wheel to two inscribed buildings: Hegui Lou, a square tulou of 1732 built on marshy ground, and Huaiyuan Lou, a compact round one of 1909 with fine woodwork. The village took its present name from a 2006 film shot here.

Hekeng

Thirteen inscribed buildings packed into a small valley, with a free hillside viewpoint and very few visitors. It is the least developed of the Nanjing sites and has no public bus.

We cover the first four in detail in our Tianluokeng and Yunshuiyao guide.

Yongding

Chengqi Lou, Gaobei

Called the king of the tulou. Built in 1709, it has four concentric rings, the outermost four storeys high with 288 rooms, some 370 rooms in all, and an ancestral hall at the centre. Jiang-clan families still live in it. Walk through the gate and you see ring within ring, which explains what a tulou is better than any diagram.

Zhencheng Lou, Hongkeng

The prince to Chengqi's king. Built in 1912 by the family of a tobacco merchant, it is the most refined of the big round houses. The outer ring is divided into eight segments on the pattern of the Eight Trigrams, and the central hall has Greek-style columns and wrought-iron balustrades, which says something about where the money had been made.

Kuiju Lou and Fuyu Lou, Hongkeng

Hongkeng is a whole village of tulou along a stream. Kuiju Lou, finished in 1834, is a square building in a stepped, palace-like form. Fuyu Lou, from 1880, is in the “five phoenix” style, with roofs rising in tiers, and part of it operates as a guesthouse.

Chuxi

The furthest out and the quietest. Its oldest building, Jiqing Lou, dates from 1419 and has seventy-two separate staircases, one for each household, so that no family had to cross another's space.

Hongkeng and Gaobei are about 4 km apart, ten minutes by road. Chuxi is 25 minutes or more beyond.

How to decide

You have one day. Nanjing. It is closer, and the sights lie along one road. Trying to reach Yongding and back in a day leaves little time on the ground. See how to get there.

You have two days. Do both. Day one in Nanjing, night in Taxia or Yunshuiyao, day two across the hill to Gaobei and Hongkeng, and back to Xiamen in the evening.

You care about architecture. Yongding first. Chengqi Lou and Zhencheng Lou are the most complete large buildings open to visitors.

You care about photographs and landscape. Nanjing. The Tianluokeng overlook and the Yunshuiyao riverside are the scenes.

You dislike crowds. Hekeng or Chuxi, the least visited site in each county.

You are travelling with children or older relatives. Nanjing, with a night nearby to break the drive. Yunshuiyao is level walking by a river.

What they have in common

All of these are lived-in villages run as ticketed scenic areas. Residents sell tea, dried fruit and souvenirs from their doorways. In most buildings visitors are asked to stay on the ground floor. Going upstairs is sometimes allowed, occasionally for a small fee paid to the family. Midday in high season is busy everywhere. Early morning and late afternoon are when the courtyards are quiet, which is one reason to stay overnight.

Quick answers

Keep planning

• Xiamen to the Tulou
• Tianluokeng and Yunshuiyao
• Staying in a tulou
• Fujian Tulou day trip from Xiamen
• Fujian in 7 days
• 5-day Xiamen and Tulou tour