Kaiping Diaolou and Villages

Overview

About

The diaolou, fortified towers, stand in the countryside of Kaiping in Guangdong; 1,833 survive. On 28 June 2007 the World Heritage Committee, meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand, inscribed Kaiping Diaolou and Villages as a World Heritage Site. The four nominated areas are Sanmenli village in Chikan, Zili village and the Fang clan watchtower in Tangkou, Jinjiangli village in Xiangang, and the Majianglong villages in Baihe.

Towers have been built in Kaiping since the Ming dynasty against floods and bandits, but they were few until the Opium War.

Between 1900 and 1931 1,648 towers were built, 89.9% of the total, 940 of them in 1921–31 alone. Bandits were numerous and the early Republic was a time of constant warfare and robbery: between 1912 and 1926 schools were raided eight times and over a hundred teachers and pupils kidnapped, so towers that guarded against both flood and bandits appealed to overseas Chinese families, who built more than 3,000 at the peak.

In the 1940s, as the United States and Canada relaxed immigration restrictions, relatives emigrated to join their families and tower building dwindled and stopped. The last, Jianlu in Xintang village, Chikan, dates from 1949; only seven were built between 1943 and 1949.

Ruishi Lou, called the finest tower in Kaiping, is of concrete and combines Roman, Byzantine and Baroque elements; the towers typically mix Chinese house forms with Greek, Roman and Islamic styles.

By function there are communal towers (473 survive), residential towers (1,149) and watchtowers (221); by material, stone (10), rammed earth (100), brick (249) and concrete (1,474).

News

In 2008 a seven-minute video of a girl in Kaiping being beaten, humiliated and sexually assaulted by a group of young people spread widely online; in July the Jiangmen police arrested eight suspects.