The Western hall
White columns at the heart.
Gisling唐戈 — CC BY 3.0 · Lennartbj — CC BY-SA 4.0 · stone wu — CC BY-SA 3.0 · 江上清风1961 — CC BY 3.0 · Motohiro Sunouchi — CC BY 2.0 · Motohiro Sunouchi — CC BY 2.0 · Loh Swee Meng — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Zhangzhugang — CC BY-SA 3.0
The finest house in Hongkeng, a village of round and square tulou on both banks of a mountain stream, part of «Fujian Tulou» on UNESCO's World Heritage List since 2008. The Chinese call Zhencheng Lou «the Prince of Tulou»; the Lin family built it from 1912 over five years. It has two rings, an outer one of four storeys with 184 rooms and an inner one of two storeys with 32 rooms, divided by firewalls into eight sections linked by doors, and at its heart a Western-style hall with white columns where the clan gathers for weddings and family occasions. The village holds other houses worth seeing: the rectangular Fuyu Lou with its stepped roofs, Kuiju Lou with its white facade, and the tiny round Rusheng Lou, just 18.2 metres across. Tickets for the Hongkeng Tulou Folk Culture Village cost about CNY 90, a joint ticket with the Gaobei cluster 98 for two days, and it opens from 6.30 am into the evening, per visitor guides.
White columns at the heart.
Split by firewalls.
Along the stream.
Hongkeng village, Hukeng town, Yongding District, Longyan, Fujian
Tours and tourist buses leave from Xiamen and Longyan, about three hours from Xiamen, and a night's stay lets you see more than one cluster at an easy pace.