The area around Taishan has wonderful Chinese takes on styles of western architecture, writes Clifford Coonan
SCORES OF Tuscan castles with elegant Rococo styling or Spanish adobes are not what you expect when travelling through southern Chinese countryside, but then, the area around Taishan is no ordinary Chinese countryside.
The odd sight of medieval battlements and Romanesque arches bears testament to Taishan’s history as an emigration centre for hundreds of years, as Taishanese left to go to the Europe, the United States and Canada, setting up restaurants, building railroads and panning for gold in the expanding New World.
These days the people of Taishan are leaving in droves to study in the universities and work in the software companies in the West, and the government is worried about a “brain drain” that could stifle much-needed innovation as China emerges as an economic powerhouse. The region’s history is startlingly familiar to Irish visitors.
The slits in the walls of the “cannon towers” or pao lou, where the residents would shoot at marauding bandits, are relics from an earlier period of mass migration.
Approaching one building, you see a narrow, heavily fortified entrance. The windows are small and barred, but heavily ornate, and so are clearly a difficult proposition for an early 20th century bandit, keen to steal the booty of a returned emigrant flush with cash from building the railroads of the American West. At the top are turrets and Romanesque arches.
Some of the buildings are more than 400 years old, but most of these edifices were built by returned emigrants in the early 20th century, who needed a way to protect their money from robbers during the period of lawlessness which characterised the dying days of the Qing dynasty, which ended in 1911, and the early Republican period of Chinese history.
“During the late Qing dynasty, there were lots of bandits in Taishan and they attacked villagers and launched raids. So the villagers built these structures with defensive elements on each of the four corners,” says Cai Hetian, director of the Taishan museum.
“The buildings were also used by local people to flee to during times of flood. Later, some immigrants came from overseas and brought with them these baroque styles, and Gothic and Italian styles,” says Cai, speaking in his office in the museum, as a gilded bust of Chairman Mao Zedong looks on.
“Those immigrants who came back built these houses for two reasons – to live in and to defend themselves against bandits,” says Cai.
Driving out of Zhuhai, bordering Macau, you soon see such houses dotting the countryside. Many of them have Chinese characters on the top, which name the family and have good luck messages such as “Ming Prosper Building” or “Lou Success Peace”.
In China, a combination of the rush to modernity and poor construction has seen many significant buildings destroyed, but the area around Taishan is full of wonderful examples of Chinese takes on the great architectural styles of the West. There are whole streets with covered arcades similar to the style seen in northern Italian cities such as Bologna, and family homes modelled on the Romanesque Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Others are built in Spanish adobe style, and there are also dwellings with strong elements of southeast Asian architecture.
However, many of the owners of these buildings have left the country – some chose to stay away after the revolution in 1949, others were landowners who were persecuted by the Communists in various “Anti-Rightist” campaigns during the 1950s. Dozens lie bereft like the farmhouses left behind by the depopulation that hit Ireland after the Great Famine, and by subsequent generations.
The Wu family built a red-bricked house, complete with altar for ancestor worship, but they have since all emigrated to Canada and Britain, and the house has been converted into a school.
Many of the houses were constructed with materials destined to crumble, especially the earlier “cannon towers” which were built using mud and earth, and which are nearly all fallen away. The later constructions used what locals called “red cement”, referring to the fact that many of the British engineers who arrived in the early 20th century were believed to have red hair.
Since that turbulent period, around 3,000 towers have crumbled or been destroyed in Taishan, leaving less than 2,000 standing today.
Cai is on a campaign to get the overseas Chinese to hand over the buildings to the government, so they can be renovated and preserved for posterity, and also so they can be developed as tourist attractions. Some of the watchtowers, or dialou, have World Cultural Heritage status, including those in Kaiping. Scenes for a movie were shot in one restored arcade.
Many of the buildings are in a dangerous state of repair. “So many of these buildings are falling down. It’s a big headache for us, trying to preserve them. So we are trying to get in touch with the owners overseas to see if they will hand them over to the government to take care of. That way we can develop tourism,” says Cai.
The area around Taishan is one of the great emigration centres of China, and the museum has an exhibition about the hundreds of thousands of people who left the area over the years. The depictions of weeping families bidding farewell to their loved ones as they take to the boat for foreign shores could be in a folk museum in the west of Ireland.
Indeed, many of the Cantonese emigrants who left the area around Taishan worked alongside Irish emigrants. In 1869, a team of Chinese and Irish workers laid a record 16km of railway in less than 12 hours, part of the Central Pacific, the western section of America’s first transcontinental railroad.
The Taishanese settled in Hong Kong, San Francisco and Canada. Gary Locke, the US commerce secretary and former governor of the state of Washington, is descended from Taishanese.
An exhibition in the museum shows a small family weeping as the man of the family leaves on an emigration ship.
The flow of people hasn’t slowed up much here, and local leaders are worried about a brain drain, as the population has dropped by nearly 10 per cent in the last two decades to less than one million people.
Emigrants are known as “sea turtles”, because the term sea turtle in Mandarin is a homonym for returned emigrants.
In a 2007 report, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences reckoned that more than 300,000 talented Chinese emigrants are working in high-value-added industries in other countries.
Tens of thousands of university graduates are leaving China every year, and over one million Chinese students have studied abroad since the 1980s, when China’s opening up and reform period began. Two-thirds of them stay abroad after graduating.
“There is a lot of depopulation here, as many travel overseas. The population continues to grow, but many leave. Many find it easy to migrate because they have relatives overseas, or a boyfriend or girlfriend overseas. And many go to study,” says Cai.
According to the data from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there are an estimated 35 million Chinese living abroad, making Chinese the biggest emigrant group in the world. Of those overseas Chinese, around five million went abroad after 1979, said Prof Liang Yingming at the Research Centre of Overseas Chinese at Peking University.
Last year China overtook Britain and New Zealand as the biggest contributor of emigrants to Australia. The government has launched the “Thousand Person Plan”, aimed at wooing young Chinese with doctorates back from foreign universities with tax exemptions.
It’s not all one-way. A UN report estimated that China receives about €14 billion every year from emigrants, and is one of the largest beneficiaries globally of remittances. Not enough of this cash is finding its way to the crumbling, beautiful castles of Taishan. The brain drain threatens to destroy one of the great architectural oddities of the world.