Kaiping Diaolou and Villages 开平碉楼与村落

About Kaiping Diaolou and Villages

Kaiping Diaolou and Villages (开平碉楼与村落) is the World Heritage property made up of four groups of fortified tower houses, or diaolou (碉楼), and the villages around them in the countryside of Kaiping (开平), Jiangmen (江门), Guangdong.

Diaolou are multi-storey fortified towers, most of them reinforced concrete; 1,833 still stand in Kaiping's villages. Residential towers are the most common type (1,149), followed by communal towers (473) and lookout towers (221). Lookouts were put at village entrances or on nearby hills and fitted with searchlights and alarms: when bandits raided Kaiping Middle School (开平中学) at Chikan (赤坎) in December 1922, a tower searchlight picked them out and village militias recovered the headmaster and students.

Villagers here had built towers against floods and bandits since the Ming dynasty, but few existed before the Opium War. From the mid-19th century many Kaiping farmers left to work in the United States and Canada, and their remittances paid for a building boom: 1,648 towers went up between 1900 and 1931, and at the peak there were more than 3,000. Building faded in the 1940s as families joined emigrants abroad; the last tower, Jianlu (健庐) in Xintang village (新塘村), dates from 1949. The towers mix Chinese forms with ancient Greek, Roman and Islamic motifs.

The State Council listed the towers as a national key protected site in 2001. On 28 June 2007 the 31st World Heritage session in New Zealand added the property to the World Heritage List, making it the first World Cultural Heritage site in Guangdong, and in December 2020 the Kaiping Diaolou Cultural Tourism Zone (开平碉楼文化旅游区) gained a 5A rating. The four inscribed groups lie in Sanmenli (三门里) in Chikan, Zili village (自力村) in Tangkou (塘口), the Majianglong (马降龙) cluster in Baihe (百合) and Jinjiangli (锦江里) in Xiangang (蚬冈).

What to look for

• Yinglong Lou (迎龙楼) in Sanmenli, built by the Guan lineage in the Jiajing reign of the Ming (1522-1566) and the oldest standing diaolou in Kaiping
• Zili village (自力村), with nine towers, the most of the four inscribed groups, rising over rice paddies
• Fangshi Denglou (方氏灯楼), a five-storey tower of 1920 named for its large searchlight
• The Majianglong (马降龙) cluster, spread over five villages of the Huang and Guan families in bamboo groves
• Ruishi Lou (瑞石楼) behind Jinjiangli village, a nine-floor tower described as the tallest diaolou in Kaiping

Location & getting there

Getting to Kaiping Diaolou and Villages

• Search for 开平碉楼与村落 with 江门市 and 开平市.