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| Folk Customs-
Hakka Village > The Earthen Dwellings of Yongding |
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Zhen
Cheng Lou -- Welcoming Distinguished Guests.
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As early as l,000 years ago, some of the
original Hakka who migrated to Shibi continued on to the Yongding
area, then still sparsely populated. To protect themselves against
bandits and wild beasts, they used local materials to build
tall, multi-storey circular earthen buildings where a whole
family or clan could live. These buildings were both spacious
and practically impregnable, and this unique building style
has continued until now.
The most famous of these Hakka buildings is called the Zhencheng
Building, and is located at the entrance of Hongkeng Village.
The Zhencheng Building consists of
two concentric circles;
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Huan
Ji Lou -- Holding Inner Round Houses.
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the outer circle four storeys high and the
inner one two. This arrangement is designed to allow sufficient
light to reach the inner sections. Inside the inner circle is
the centre of the building, where there is a theatre-like main
hall. In the main hall are four tall stone supporting columns,
looking more like Western-style architecture than the traditional
Chinese style of brackets and upturned eaves.
The circular structures surrounding the hall are also of
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This
basin at the centre of the Wuyi Mountain Range is home
to many Hakka families.
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unusual design, with elaborate spiralling
cast iron railings painted green. The whole building consists
of eight sections, eight staircases and eight halls with a well
on both the left and right sides. As it resembles the Eight
Trigrams used in Taoist divination, the Zhencheng Building is
also called the Eight Trigrams Building.
In 1985, an exhibition of scale models of architecture from
all over the world was held in Los Angeles. The Chinese architectural
models on display included the famous Heavenly Temple and Yonghe
Palace in Beijing, as well as the Zhencheng Building, an archetype
of the circular earthen buildings of the Hakka people. |
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