location : 2hrs by bus from Guangzhou

To the west of the Pearl River Delta, in villages nestling amid green bamboo and banana groves and surrounded by a patchwork of rice paddies, stand a number of incongruous dark towers bristling with battlements, fearsome fortresses full of arrow slits, and even the occasional elegant turret above an ornate mansion. All these buildings, in the middle of the Chinese countryside, look like faint reflections of a distant West. How did they end up on the banks of the Kaiping rice paddies?

Kaiping is situated in south-western Guangdong and, according to official figures, has 1,833 of these buildings or diaolou, most of which were built in the early twentieth century.

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