福建土楼

11/4/12 I book us on a visit to the 福建永定高北土楼 at the Bestel tourist desk for today for CNY 138 each person including a lunch and entrance fees. After breakfast we get picked up by the tour operator and the coach journey departs Xiamen at 8.30am.

Stop for “方便”

The coach is full. There is maybe 52 pax. 95% of them are 大陆旅客 and so we get the fair share of spitting and shouting on board and smoking and throwing rubbish when we are out of the coach. SIGH! All the tourists have to attend this "selling session" organized by the government to view the products they hope to sell us. No choice and we cannot opt out. This is forced selling to the nth degree.

This is where we break for lunch at 阿才饭店. It is just a little out house in a cowboy lane a few minutes' drive to the Tulou entrance. SM and I can only eat the vege dishes and forgo all meat. We eat our lunch in record time.

At 12.30pm we arrive the Tulou site and are led by our Tulou tour guide through the UNESCO world heritage site. The day is very hot and humid. It feels like in the 30's.

Things they sell at the Tulou may not be very expensive - fresh "kampung" eggs, bamboo shoots, tulou models, paintings, Fujian tea leaves, Tulou locally made cigarettes, more bamboo shoots and some 野菜.

The tulous were designed and built in clusters for the simple reason that "unity is strength" therefore residents of tulous are normally related to each other. There is normally a stream nearby so they can get water supply, and an access road from outside the tulous leading to them. Arriving at 桥福楼。

Nowadays they have tapped water but the water source is still the fresh water from the nearby mountains.

桥福楼 was built with funding from overseas Chinese. This is a pic of the person responsible for the funding and he was a 华橋 from Burma.

Tulous are normally built in concentric, circular form in order to protect their residents from aggressive, outside elements.

 The tulou always have eaves making the building cooler

Similar to the storage cabinets we use in our bedrooms except these cabinets are mounted outside their bedrooms as they are tiny by our standard.

Here we have a common altar for praying to this "god"

This is a machine they used to cut the cigarette tobacco in the old days. Apparently.

世泽楼土楼

A very practical solution of using organic timber slats to support tiled roofs for walkways

I like these pebbled flooring.

The tulous normally have 4 storeys. The windows for the first 2 storeys cannot be opened from the inside (i.e. they are closed at all times) so that any intruders would not be able to climb into the tulous from the exterior

The gutters are added in modern times to divert rain water

These tiles are made of clay and sand

The row of 毛厕 that are still used to this day in the tulou. These toilets are naturlly for communal use ....

The walls of a typical tulou is at least 1.2m thick; that's 4 ft thick. The materials they used to build the walls were a mixture of mud, lime, and straw. Apparently they were strong and resistant to fire and so helped to keep its residents from possible outside intruders.

The king of all tulous in Fujian Province ..... 承启楼

土楼王。。。承启楼

This King of all Tulous was built with 4 circular walls/compartmental sections. Each liveable section was used for different purpose. As I recall, the innermost section was for the scholars' use, the next section was for living, the next for cooking, and the outermost section was meant for general purpose use/ recreation.

The serve lots of 观音茶 to us tourists - apparently the tea is planted, picked and dried in the area.

We are told by our tour guide to climb to higher grounds to get a better view of the clusters of tulou and so we start to track up hill and on the way we see these bamboo shoots growing enormously big out of the ground. And these are edible.

The scenery begins to "open up" for us in the sense that we can see farther and gain a better perspective of the tulou cluster rather than just one tulou at a time. We can now see the terrain and the hills in the background. Tea plantation is in the higher terrain and the tobacco in the lower ridges.

This is the view of the cluster from the highest hill top in the area. The view simply is stunning and takes my breadth away .....

The faces of tulou

We come across the faces of tulou. The young and the old. There are reportedly 300 residents living in one typical tulou. Not surprisingly many of them are young children and babies. Many of them share the same surname and still live in the same tulou today.

This little guy sits on his little chair sipping his drink quietly. Oblivious to all the tourists walking past him.

The two 阿嫲 talking to each other quite loudly and animatedly about their happenings.

Our tour guide 小 江. I am surprised and disappointed she could not understand my version of 梅县客话。$%^&*(. She has just recently moved out of a round tulou with her family into a square one.

 

This little guy has beautiful eyes, a wicked smile and a round face. Unfortunately I cannot speak in the Hakka he understands, to him.

This painter is quite talented because he is using organic material and not just conventional acrylic

He tells us he is already 75 years old because he has been drinking the tea he is selling. hahaha.

This old gentlemen is a gentle soul. He offers us lots of cups of tea even though we have told him that we are not interested in buying the tea leaf.

Today is another important day in my travel milestone as I make it to see the UNESCO world heritage Fujian Tulou. It is definitely a must-see feature in a traveler's calendar if one is interested in the history, architecture, culture of the 客家 people who live in these tulou and their future. I am sure I have only gained very little insights today - I am like what they say 学人旅遊, 走马看花。

So far my visits to Unesco sites have not disappointed me as there are something I can experience and touch and feel. I guess that's what travel means - we see, we feel, we talk to the locals and we get to know them as who they are, after we are gone from them.

Our tour of tulou finishes at around 3pm and we make our way back to the dreadful city of Xiamen. Tonight's dinner is at Pizza Hut. We order Hawaiian pizza (pretty good!) and baked rice with chicken.