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Now picture this in your mind's eye:
A fortress tower, not one, but many. All peppered throughout a picturesque countryside. Castles in the sky.
Concrete and stone structures built almost a century ago. Roman and Greek inspired columns... Mediterranean themed arches - some nicely proportioned, but many not. Architectural domes that echo Byzanthium places of worship from days gone by. But wait, what's this? A Chinese styled roof form adorned next to the western neo-classical column and arches? What on earth...? You wouldn't expect western and eastern architecture to mix like this.
These are the "diao lou", or diaolou (¶} ¥ ¸M ¼Ó) ... phallic structures that are dropped onto many old villages in a small area in southern China, in the area known as Kaiping, the land of my ancestors. On the piece I wrote for Wikipedia, I describe the diaolou as:
... fortified multi-storey towers, generally made of reinforced concrete. These towers are located mainly in Kaiping County, Guangdong province, China. Kaiping together with its neighbouring counties of Enping, Taishan and Xinwei are collectively known as the "Four counties". It was from the four counties that many of the Chinese labourers to North America originated from.
Also known as the "Kaiping diaolou", the first towers were built during the early Qing Dynasty, reaching a peak in the 1920s and 1930s, when there were more than three thousand of these structures. Today, approximately 1,833 diaolou remain standing. Although the diaolou served mainly as protection against forays by bandits, a few of them also served as living quarters.
Kaiping has traditionally been a region of major emigration abroad, and a melting pot of ideas and trends brought back by overseas Chinese. As a result, many diaolou incorporate architectural features from China and from the West.
Leaning tower in Xingang, Kaiping
(near Tian Luo Shan "Snail Mountain")
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Legend of how the Diaolou was named
I recall, as a young knee-high, listening to my grandma, stories about "very tall structures". Not knowing what the heck she was talking about, I pictured skyscrapers in our village(!) Having forgotten about them until my first trip to my ancestral village in 2005, Grandma's stories came flooding back into my mind when I arrived at our ancestral village.
On the drive there from Guangzhou, I kept seeing over and over again, variations of these tall grey structures like sore thumbs popping up amongst the rambling one and two storey village dwellings. I took thousands of photos of the many Diaolou (no plural form, as Diaolou is both a singular and plural form of the noun) I happened to view on the journey.
The word "Diaolou" comprises of two Chinese characters ¸M ¼Ó: "Diao" apparently derived from the word "to throw" + the radical for "stone", and "Lou", meaning "tower". The story behind the word "Diao" goes back a century where a mother threw herself off a tall building instead of disclosing the whereabouts of her husband and son to some bandits (who wanted to kidnap the men).
I've been discussing the "diao" reference to "throwing off" with some colleagues. This reference came from the book "Old Houses-diaolou and Folk dwellings in Kaiping" by Zhang Guoxiong in which he indicated that this reference originates from the story of a diaolou that was built in honor of a mother who had committed suicide. The legend goes that during the early reign of the Qing Dynasty, a man named Xu Long, in the Longtian village of Yueshan town, Kaiping, had a mother that jumped off a cliff rather than to surrender the information to bandits (who had wanted to kidnap the man and his son).
In addition, according to Ricci's Dictionary, diao means a "house made of stone", and diaolou is also a military term which could be translated as a watchtower or a fort with more than one storey (sheltering a small troop to guard a frontier).
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Kaiping's oldest Diaolou:
The oldest Diaolou in Kaiping was built during the Ming Dynasty (around AD 1530).
It is located near Xingang [clam hill] market town (pronounced "Hin Gong" in the Kaiping dialect).
Note that the entire 3 storey building is built almost entirely of brick
... and oversized BIG bricks (that were the common standard during that time).
A question had been presented to me:
"if the diaolou were a result of overseas contributions at the turn of the last century, how do you explain the existence of a Ming dynasty diaolou?"
I believe the diaolou as a generic term for "fortress building". Meaning, late 18th to early 19th century fortifications were modelled after these 15th century structures for the very same reasons - for protection of life and material goods.
The 19th century structures grew in height, as techology of the day made it economically possible (ie. the appearance of reinforced concrete as a building material).
It is also interesting to note that the early Kaipingnese/ Cantonese word for concrete is "hoong moe nie" - meaning: red hair's soil [red hair=foreigner]
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