Kaiping (开平)

What this county is

Kaiping sits in the southwest corner of the Pearl River Delta, on the low alluvial plain where the Tan River runs slow, and it belongs to Jiangmen — the prefecture the maps lump together as the Five Counties. For most of its history it was the seam between four counties: Xinhui, Taishan, Enping and Xinxing all touched it, and because it belonged to all of them it was guarded by none. A no man's land, and bandits thrived in the gap.

Then the money arrived, and with it the danger. Through the nineteenth century, as gold was found in California and Australia and the great railways of North America were laid, the young men of Kaiping crossed the ocean to dig and to lay track. They sent their wages home in the hands of letter carriers called water guests, and when the foreign laws turned against them, many came back with the money in their pockets — and built the towers.

The towers, in one paragraph

A diaolou is a multi-storey fortified tower, and Kaiping has 1,833 of them — the largest open-air museum of defensive architecture on earth. They came in three kinds: a watch tower standing at the head of the village with a searchlight and a bell; a communal tower ten or more households paid for together, so whole families could climb in and wait; and a living tower built by one returned man for his own family to dwell in year round. Thick-walled, narrow-windowed, gun ports at every corner, a swallow's-nest turret jutting over the wall, a watch platform on the roof. And on top of all that seriousness: Byzantine domes, Baroque scrolls, Greek and Roman colonnades, Gothic and Islamic arches — as if a traveller had emptied his memory onto the skyline.

The four villages worth the train

The finest of the towers cluster in four villages, and it was these four that UNESCO named when it put Kaiping on the world map in 2007. Sanmenli (三门里) holds the oldest, the Welcoming Dragon Tower, raised in the Ming to give villagers a dry floor above the flood. Zilicun (自力村) is the postcard: fifteen towers and six villas among paddy fields, lotus ponds and banyan. Majianglong (马降龙) tucks fifteen more into bamboo groves and stone paths — the quietest of the four, and the one travel writers keep calling among the loveliest villages on earth. Jinjiangli (锦江里) holds just three, but one of them is the Jade Stone Tower: nine storeys of Roman arches and Baroque gable, the First Tower of Kaiping.

Twenty of the towers in these four groups carry the World Heritage inscription — the first ever made for the culture of people who left, and still the only one in Guangdong. The long story of the men, the bandits and the towers is on the Kaiping Diaolou page.

Also here

Chikan (赤坎), twenty minutes from the towers, is the old river town: more than six hundred qilou — the arcaded merchant houses of the diaspora — standing along the Tan River, and the location for two films worth watching before you come. Liyuan (立园) is a private garden built by a returned merchant in the 1930s, Chinese landscaping fused with Western villas. And at Nanlou (南楼), free to visit, a monument marks seven villagers who held their tower to the end in the last months of the war — the towers' other life, as defence to the finish.