Huaiyuan Lou

Huaiyuan Lou is a double-ring round tulou built in the Qing dynasty. It covers a site of 1,384.7 square meters, with a building area of 3,468 square meters, and is well preserved. It became a provincial protected site in 2001 and a national key site in 2006, and in 2008 it was inscribed on the World Heritage List as a typical representative of the Fujian tulou. A tulou is a large dwelling whose load-bearing walls are rammed from raw earth, built for a whole clan to live in and also made for defense, and Huaiyuan Lou is an example of the round kind.^1,2

Fujian tulou stand on load-bearing walls of raw, unprocessed earth. The main material is red soil, mixed with fir strips, pebbles, lime, fine sand and bamboo, and bound with glutinous rice paste, brown sugar and egg white; it is rammed into walls under a roof of fired tiles. The soil should hold 18 percent water, and a wall has to be leaned slightly at first and becomes upright only as it dries. The base of the outer wall is a stone footing one to two meters thick, laid with granite blocks and large river pebbles in a lime-sand-clay mortar and sunk about two meters into the ground to stop attackers from tunneling in. In a tulou the first and second floors have no windows outward, and only the third floor and above open to the outside. In a round tulou each household's rooms are fairly separate and joined by a shared ring corridor, popularly called the horse-running gallery. Huaiyuan Lou is a double-ring round tulou, one of the round kind.^1,2