Hakka's
Earthen Round Houses in Fujian Nov.21-23,
2008
Fujian province is China's south eastern most province in the
mainland facing Taiwan across the strait. The journey starts
from Xiamen, beautiful seaport city with Gulangyu Island; then
dirve into the villages in the mountains south and west of Fujian
for the magical Chinese Architecture Tu Lou, the earthen buildings
of Hakkas. The unadorned tu lou are either round or square,
and huge (10-17 meters' high), and were designed as a fortress
and apartment building in one. The structures typically had
only one entranceway and no windows at ground level.
Kaiping's Old Watchtower buildings has been UNESCO-listed as
World Heritage Site. Kaiping, 136km southwest of Guangzhou,
164km from the Macau border, and also reachable by sea directly
from Hong Kong, is China at its most pastoral. Peasants in conical
straw hats bend over their plants, and position hand-powered
threshing machines on shoulder poles, much as in other provinces.
But here they often toil beneath the gaze of extraordinary towers
called diaolou, which are partly Portuguese Gothic, like Citizen
Kane's Xanadu broken into nearly 2,000 fragments and sprinkled
across the county.
Hani
Rice Terrace in Yuanyang,Yunnan
Dec.26-29, 2008
This subtropical area of Yunnan escaped heavy development
for tourism, and have so far been overlooked to a certain extent.
It is not included in the book Lonely Planet. Yuanyang is renowned
for its rice terraces crafted out, no sculpted by bare hands
by the Hani people one thousand years ago, transforming a barren
valley into a humid Eden; perfect for rice crops. The 1000m
of mountain slopes of terraces is still in use today, claiming
to be the world's most spectacular and extensive terraces.
