Kaiping Diaolou

The only world cultural heritage in Guangdong Province - Kaiping Diaolou and Villages, is located in Kaiping City, Jiangmen City. Kaiping "No Diaolou, No Village", the existing 1833 Diaolou are distributed in various villages in Kaiping, and are concentrated in Tangkou Town, Chikan Town, Baihe Town, and Xiangang Town. Therefore, Kaiping is known as "the hometown of various types of buildings". Diaolou refers to the multi-storey tower-style residences used for defense and living, including reinforced concrete buildings, green brick buildings, mud buildings, and stone buildings. The existing Diaolou in Kaiping were mostly built by the people at the beginning, with the purpose of defending against thieves and avoiding floods. Generally, overseas Chinese would have someone design the Diaolou blueprint and bring it back to their hometown for construction. The architectural styles and styles of Diaolou are diverse, including both traditional Chinese hard-top style and hanging mountain style, as well as foreign Gothic style, Roman style, etc. The colonnades of ancient Greece, the arches and columns of ancient Rome, the leaf-shaped arches and iron carvings of Islam, the arches of the Gothic period, the mountain flowers of Baroque architecture, the decorative techniques of the new art movement, and the architectural art forms of the industrial school, etc., have all been integrated into the local architecture of Kaiping. To be precise, it is a combination of "fragments" of various architectural styles at home and abroad, and a product of the blending of various architectural types. The Kaiping Diaolou included in the World Cultural Heritage List includes: Yinglong Building and Sanmenli Village, Zili Village and Fang's Lantern Building, Majianglong Village Diaolou Group and Jinjiangli Village, a total of 20 Diaolou in four groups, representing more than 1,800 tower buildings in Kaiping, representing the peak of nearly five centuries of tower building, and also showing the still close connection between overseas Chinese scattered abroad and their homeland. From the perspective of use function, these buildings can be divided into three forms: the public buildings mainly used for temporary refuge built by everyone, with 473 existing; the residential buildings with defense and living functions built by wealthy families alone, with 1,149 existing; and the watchtowers used for joint defense and early warning, with 221 existing. From the perspective of building materials, there are stone buildings, rammed earth buildings, brick buildings and reinforced concrete buildings, and the latter two are the majority of what we see this time. From the perspective of construction time, the earliest Diaolou can be traced back to the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, and it reached its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, most of which were built by overseas Chinese returning home during the Republic of China. People analyze from the perspectives of historical culture and geographical environment, the period of the Republic of China was a period of social transformation when China's internal troubles and foreign troubles coexisted, domestic wars were frequent, and social security was extremely poor. Kaiping is located in the "four no-man's land" at the junction of Xinhui, Taishan, Enping, and Xinxing counties, where bandits are particularly rampant. In addition, it is a low-lying plain area, often suffering from floods and floods, and the initial intention of building Diaolou was mainly to prevent bandits and floods.