Debra Li

WHEN Qiu Man, a wealthy emigrant to Malaysia, decided to build a mansion in his native Longgang for his fifth wife and daughter in the 1930s, he probably did not expect it to be turned into rented apartments some 70 years later.

With paolou (fortified towers) located in two corners of its courtyard, the old residence — with 30 to 40 rooms — is rented out to garbage collectors for less than 3,000 yuan (US$416) a month.

Qiu Guanying, daughter of Qiu Man, recalled her father as a patriot who donated generously to the local guerillas during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.

“It took father three years to build it. And big sums of money were spent,” said the housewife in her 70s. “Perhaps due to Japanese invasion, construction was halted after the main part was finished,” she said.

Normally, mansions built by affluent emigrants would have towers in each of the four corners of a courtyard. Qiu’s Xuanqing New Residence has only two. The mansion, which used to be set against a backdrop of green banana trees, is lost today in a forest of modern residential blocks and factory workshops.

In the four-meter-high lobby there still hangs a plate inscribed with Chinese characters translating roughly as “benevolence and justice,” which must have been the motto of the owner. Liao Wujiao, the lonely fifth wife of Qiu Man, gazes out of a black-and-white photo on a table placed in the center of the room.

“My father sent mother and me back to live in the residence in 1949, while he returned to live with other wives and children in Malaysia where he passed away in 1959. The big house brought misfortunes. My mother suffered blows in several political movements because of the estate and committed suicide by drowning herself in a river in 1968,” Qiu Guanying said.

The three-storied towers, spacious and built using reinforced concrete imported from abroad some 70 years ago, are still strong, though birds have handily converted the embrasures into nests.

“It’s best if the subdistrict authorities can invest some money to turn it into a folk museum. The house, still well maintained, is worth such a treatment,” Qiu said.

Dwarfed by surrounding high-rises, Xinwei Paolou, also located in Longgang District, has a different story. Zeng Hongwen, a revolutionary and follower of Sun Yat-sen, bought the tower during the anti-Japanese war and used it as a fortress for guerillas.

“He installed wooden floors in it and turned it into a base of the Dongjiang Column soldiers. They lived and had meetings here, and opened fire from the embrasures. The walls were so thick that the bullets returned by the Japanese would bounce back,” said 75-year-old Zeng Jiyong, son of Zeng Hongwen.

The four-storied tower, adjacent to a row of five dilapidated brick bungalows, remains under lock and key today.

“I used to rent it to migrants, but dare not continue because it’s too old. Nearby constructions must have weakened its foundations,” he said.

In each corner of the terrace, there is a gargoyle used to drain rainwater. The gargoyles are shaped like carp, the Chinese word for which is similar to the word for “abundance” (yu).

“Some local towers have gargoyles in the shape of cabbages, which in Chinese sound similar to the word for ‘fortune’ (cai). This is a distinguishing characteristic in towers built in the 1920s and 30s compared with earlier establishments. Evident is their blend of Chinese and Western architectural elements,” said Zhang Yibin, a local archaeologist fascinated by the towers.

Zhang, who has spent 16 years investigating local towers, will soon publish a book about his findings.

“I would like to call the local towers paolou rather than diaolou, not just to differentiate them from the towers in Kaiping in western Guangdong,” he said.

The word diaolou became widely known after some 20 such structures in the subprefecture of Kaiping were placed on the World Heritage List.

“Chinese used ‘diao’ to refer to the towers built by ethnic minorities as early as in the Tang Dynasty (618-906). The ones in Kaiping were given this name because, possibly, a majority of them, built by emigrants, feature a blend of Chinese and Western styles. It also could be that people chose the name diaolou, with an exotic appeal, to help it get listed as a UNESCO heritage site,” Zhang said.

Originally, however, Kaiping villagers called their towers paolou too. Zhang found that the word paolou dated back to the Song Dynasty (960-1127).

“Long before the anti-Japanese war, Chinese built paolou for defense in times of upheaval. Like the Great Wall in northern China, some 6,000 towers served similar roles in South China, extending from Sichuan and Tibet to Guangxi, Guangdong and even Hainan,” the researcher said.

Shenzhen had more than 1,000 paolou before the beginning of the reform and opening-up drive, second only to Kaiping, which still has 1,833 towers.

The majority of local towers were built earlier than those in Kaiping, and also in a more traditional way. Some were made using stone, some using pise (compressed earth) and others using brick. Only a small number were built from reinforced concrete.

Of the existing 550 paolou in Shenzhen, the earliest was built during the reign of Emperor Jiaqing (1760-1820) of the Qing Dynasty, Zhang said.

“These are a precious legacy of Shenzhen, and a significant part of the traditional culture of South China,” he added.