Suopo Watchtowers 梭坡碉楼

About Suopo Watchtowers

The IICC-Xi'an heritage database records the Danba group as 562 towers spread across 15 townships and 181 administrative villages, standing mainly in the east of the county and along the Jinchuan and Dadu rivers, and built of mountain stone, clay and timber on four-, five-, eight- and thirteen-cornered plans. Published counts for Suopo itself do not agree: a 2015 Ganzi Daily article on the prefecture government site gives the township 175 towers against 88 at Zhonglu, the two together making up 47 per cent of the county total, while the prefecture's local-chronicles item of 2012 credits Suopo with a group of 84. Both figures are given here as their sources state them.

The prefectural item dates the surviving towers from the Tang to the Qing, and describes towers rising from 10 and 20 metres through 30 and 35 metres to more than 50 at the tallest. Their walls combine stones of different sizes laid with staggered joints, and the mud that binds them is mixed with a floss beaten from chopped red hemp stalks or highland-barley and wheat straw. Four functions are distinguished: pass towers set on cliffs and choke points, beacon towers on hilltops for passing messages, village towers standing at the head of a settlement, and family towers built against the houses and used as storerooms in ordinary times. The heritage database adds that family and village towers are the most numerous kinds, that doorways are low and door leaves thick, and that the interiors are divided by wooden floors, some towers running to ten or twenty storeys.

The Ganzi Daily article explains the survival of the Suopo towers through the second Jinchuan campaign. The Qing southern line of advance crossed the Jiachu, that is the Dadu, east of Zhanggu and went up the Xiaojin river. In the sixth month of 1771 the Xiaojinchuan tusi seized Zhonglu, Suopo and two neighbouring places from the Mingzheng tusi; the court launched the campaign in the eighth month, and in the tenth the Qing force crossed the river on newly built wooden boats screened with cotton and retook Zhonglu, Suopo and three other places over successive days. The article argues that the Xiaojinchuan garrison there was thin because the two places had not been made a defensive priority, and that it was precisely because of that thin garrison that the fighting was not fierce and the towers of Zhonglu and Suopo came through the campaign intact.

What to look for

• The towers themselves, standing among the village houses on the left bank of the Dadu river; the prefectural item gives heights across the Danba group running from 10 metres to more than 50.
• The angled plans that distinguish the group: four, five, six, eight and even thirteen corners, the last of which the prefectural item says is recorded in only three examples across the Jiarong area, two of them inside Danba county.
• The walling itself: stones of varying size laid with staggered joints, bedded in mud mixed with a hemp or straw floss.
• Family towers built against the houses, which served as storerooms in peacetime, as against the beacon towers on the hilltops and the village towers at the head of a settlement.
• Leaning and bowed towers: the prefectural item records that among the Danba towers some have long leaned without falling and some have bowed into a curve.

Location & getting there

Getting to Suopo Watchtowers

Check which interiors and courtyards are accessible. Active places of worship and protected monuments may have different visitor rules.

• Search for 梭坡碉楼 with 甘孜藏族自治州 and 丹巴县.