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November 2, 2014

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Walled villages built for families, defense

Source: Shanghai Daily | November 2, 2014, Sunday | Print Edition

HAKKA walled villages located in mostly mountainous regions in southeastern China have widely been deemed as a jewel in the country’s traditional residential structures. Such residential buildings were first developed by Hakka people around the 13th century, after they immigrated into the southeast part of the country from the north.

Since Hakka people had a very strong clan system and also mostly lived in mountainous areas, they decided to build a residential structure that was easily defensible and suitable for communal living.

Built on a circular or square floor plan, a Hakka walled village features a thick, reinforced earthen wall, overhanging tiled roofs and an open courtyard in the middle. A large walled village can house more than 800 people.

Up to five or six floors high, its outside wall, which can be as thick as 1.5 meters at its bottom, is made of a mixture of gravel, sand, earth, lime and sometimes reinforced with bamboo and timber. The lime consists of sticky rice soup and egg white, a widely used building material in ancient China for their exceptional gluing effects.

Usually with only one entrance, there are no windows on its outside wall on the ground floor.

Inside the wall, the rooms are vertically divided for each family. On each floor, a family can have two or three rooms. They use the ground floor for kitchen and dining, the second floor for storage and other floors for bedrooms.

Always they will designate the best rooms in the village as the ancestors’ temple. In some villages, there are several rings of rooms, which, looking from above, resemble the ripples created by a stone dropped into calm water, the innermost ring invariably devoted to the ancestors.

Such structures have proved to be an ideal combination of fortress and apartment building. For bandits, attackers or even wild animals, they are very difficult to break into. And such structures can survive protracted sieges since people inside usually have ample stores of food and weapons, as well as an internal source of water.

For living, it’s not only quite comfortable, but also conducive to creating a harmonious relationship among its residents.

Besides those common features, Hakka people in different parts of southeastern China have also developed their individual features in their walled villages. For instance, in the northeast part of today’s Guangdong Province, local Hakka people have created Weilongwu, a combination of the Hakka walled village and the courtyard houses of northern China.

Another type of walled village is called Zoumalou, which features a veranda girding the second floor of its outer wall.

The Sijiaolou is known for its symmetrical layout and a half moon-shaped pond.

Among various types of Hakka walled villages, the best known is Tulou, located mostly in mountainous areas in Yongding and Nanjing counties in Fujian Province.

In 2008, while inscribing those Tulou buildings as a World Heritage Site, UNESCO said they bear an exceptional testimony to a long-standing cultural tradition of defensive buildings for communal living that reflect sophisticated building traditions and ideas of harmony and collaboration.

“The relationship of the massive buildings to their landscape embodies both feng shui principles and ideas of landscape beauty and harmony,” the world organization said.

Today, Hakka walled villages, especially Tulou, attract throngs of visitors every day from all corners of the world.

干打垒
(gāndǎlěi) Rammed Earth Wall

Gandalei is an ancient and economical way to build a wall or house, particularly in northern China. Often builders fill earth, sometimes mixed with straw, chalk, lime or gravel, into a temporary frame or a mold and then compress it into a solid form.

The result is either a layer of wall or an individual adobe brick.

Chinese people began to use the rammed-earth architectural techniques as early as 7,000 years ago.

A rammed earth wall is usually 1.5 to 2 meters wide at the bottom and can reach a height of 5 to 6 meters. With reinforcement such as bamboo or timber, it could be built up to several stories high.

Rammed earth walls or houses are simple to construct and if properly maintained, also strong and durable. Other advantages of this type of structure include fire-proofing, thermally efficient and environmentally friendly.

Now and Then


 

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