Shanghai Tan

A gallery inside the Tianzifang [田子坊] alley is where I first saw a photo of Fujian Tulou [福建土楼] a year ago. It picked my curiosity very much because of the round shape large scale building and the contrast of gray roof tile with omnipresent red lantern. At that time I never thought of going to see it in person because I thought it was something of the past that was all destroyed by rural modernization. Then coincidentally I learned that a colleague went to visit the Yongding county [永定县] at Fujian to see the Tulou. Suddenly that become a possibility that I keep thinking of whenever I plan a vacation. It turned out that many of my photography club members at IBM CSTL are also very interested in such a trip, so with two months of planning and much effort of Kathy and Rebecca, we have successfully organized a six-people trip to visit the Fujian Tulou at the end of December 2008.

We flew from Shanghai to Xiamen [厦门], spent a night at Gulangyu [鼓浪屿] which is a touristic island annexed to the south east sea of Xiamen. Although weather was excellent that day, it is still a Winter day and people were walking at the beach with Winter coat on, so there’s nothing sexy worth mentioning here. Small island with lots of tourists, sea wind, cold beach, salty smell, that’s about it!

The next day we drove west to the mountain side of Fujian where most Tulou are located. Over the next 3 days we hoped from one to another Tulou all over the places. We saw round, square, large, small, new, old, solid, collapsing, semi-finished, at any shapes of Tulou that could possibly exist. Not that we’ve gone through the 3,000+ Fujian Tulou, but we’ve been through two dozens of them, and passed through hundreds of them on the road. So much that at the end of the trip, we were no longer excited to see one, and we could judge by the outside surrounding whether it’s worth stopping down and go in visiting.

Though mentally tired we were, the large Tulou are spectacular to see, outside and inside. What’s truely amazing is that, despite so much dramatic changes occurring over the last thousand years, there are still more than 20,000 Tulou in active use today at Fujian and surrounding! Many of those were built during modern time. Although today’s Shanghai is so different than 20 years ago, the people living in tulou have barely seen any major changes in their life over the past century. There are many old people over 80 years old (mostly females) living in tulou, I wonder in their eyes what was the most dramatic change between today and 1920…

Click here to see the whole album.

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