Post by NZBC on May 29, 2008 21:26:41 GMT 12
www.frommers.com/destinations/guangzhou/3390010011.html
Much of southern Guangdong is a sprawl of untidy and often grim manufacturing, where sweated labor produces the world's toys. But Kaiping, 136km (85 miles) southwest of Guangzhou, 164km (102 miles) from the Macau border, and also reachable by sea directly from Hong Kong, is China at its most bucolic. Peasants in conical straw hats bend over their plants, and position hand-powered threshing machines on shoulder poles, much as in other provinces. But here they often toil beneath the gaze of extraordinary towers called diaolou, which are partly Portuguese Gothic, like Citizen Kane's Xanadu broken into nearly 2,000 fragments and sprinkled across the county. Some squat brick fortresses dating from the 17th century were intended as places of refuge for whole villages. But more alien watchtowers were mostly built by Chinese who traveled out through the treaty ports and returned wealthy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to buy land, build a house, and marry. Simple concrete towers were merely lookout points intended to provide warning of approaching bandits, but by the 1920s these had evolved into massive fortified residences up to nine stories high, sprouting turrets and loopholes, balconies and cupolas, borrowed from half-understood European styles encountered everywhere from Macau to Manila. Of around 3,000 originals, 1,833 still stand, towering over almost every village. A representative sample can be visited in a day by taxi, or Kaiping town can used as a base for exploring by public transport and on foot
Much of southern Guangdong is a sprawl of untidy and often grim manufacturing, where sweated labor produces the world's toys. But Kaiping, 136km (85 miles) southwest of Guangzhou, 164km (102 miles) from the Macau border, and also reachable by sea directly from Hong Kong, is China at its most bucolic. Peasants in conical straw hats bend over their plants, and position hand-powered threshing machines on shoulder poles, much as in other provinces. But here they often toil beneath the gaze of extraordinary towers called diaolou, which are partly Portuguese Gothic, like Citizen Kane's Xanadu broken into nearly 2,000 fragments and sprinkled across the county. Some squat brick fortresses dating from the 17th century were intended as places of refuge for whole villages. But more alien watchtowers were mostly built by Chinese who traveled out through the treaty ports and returned wealthy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to buy land, build a house, and marry. Simple concrete towers were merely lookout points intended to provide warning of approaching bandits, but by the 1920s these had evolved into massive fortified residences up to nine stories high, sprouting turrets and loopholes, balconies and cupolas, borrowed from half-understood European styles encountered everywhere from Macau to Manila. Of around 3,000 originals, 1,833 still stand, towering over almost every village. A representative sample can be visited in a day by taxi, or Kaiping town can used as a base for exploring by public transport and on foot