Inside China’s Living Fortresses: A Journey Through Fujian’s Ancient Tulou
The wooden door opens onto a circular courtyard, and suddenly the world outside seems very far away. Morning light slips between wooden balconies, voices drift from one doorway to another, and somewhere nearby water is beginning to boil for tea. It is difficult to reconcile the quiet intimacy of this place with its imposing exterior: from the air, the tulou look like enormous earthen fortresses scattered among the green mountains of Fujian.
But these remarkable buildings were never simply defensive structures—they were homes, villages and entire communities contained within walls that have sheltered generations of families.
Our journey into Fujian began in Xiamen, a modern coastal city that feels worlds away from the villages we would visit a few days later. With its high-rises, busy streets and broad waterfront, the city offers a very different picture of China from the one waiting inland. We had only just begun to leave Xiamen behind when the landscape started to change.
Tsingpu Tulou Retreat, part of the Secret Retreats collection, had arranged our journey from the city into the mountains. As the traffic and high-rises disappeared, the road narrowed and began winding through increasingly green landscapes, following rivers and climbing into the hills. Villages appeared between stretches of forest, and the landscape seemed to slow down with every kilometer.
Then the first tulou appeared.
Built primarily from packed earth, timber and stone, these enormous circular structures seem almost impossible when you first encounter them. Their thick walls and small exterior windows give them the appearance of fortresses, while their scale can be startling: some rise several stories and once housed entire extended communities.
But stepping inside changes the impression completely.
The massive exterior gives way to a central courtyard surrounded by wooden balconies and individual rooms. This is where families cooked, ate, worked, celebrated and raised their children. The architecture offered protection, but it also created a remarkable form of communal living, with generations sharing the same enclosed space.
Walking through the main tulou area, I found myself looking less at the architecture and more at the evidence of everyday life. Wooden doors opened onto the courtyard. Clothes hung from balconies. People moved between rooms. These were not ruins or reconstructed monuments but places that had continued to function as homes long after the world around them had changed.
The tulou are part of a landscape as striking as the buildings themselves. Green mountains rise around the villages, and rivers wind through the valleys below. Away from the better-known structures, we walked to smaller tulou and along paths through the surrounding countryside, where the pace became even slower.
Eventually, we stopped for tea overlooking the river.
Tea is inseparable from Fujian, one of China's great tea-producing regions, and at Tsingpu it became part of the experience of simply being there. We tasted several varieties, each with its own character, while sitting above the water and looking out across the mountains. There was nowhere else we needed to be.
The food offered another connection to the landscape. Among the dishes we tried was shrimp fried with tea, an unexpectedly delicate combination that brought together two of Fujian's defining ingredients. After tasting it, the pairing seemed almost inevitable: the fragrance of the tea carried into the dish, turning a simple plate of shrimp into something that felt distinctly rooted in the region.
At Tsingpu, we also spent time trying traditional handicrafts. Sitting down to make something ourselves was a welcome change from simply observing. Our attempts were inevitably less accomplished than those of the people who had practiced these techniques for years, but the process offered a glimpse into the patience and skill behind traditions that can otherwise feel distant when seen only from the outside.
The retreat itself is part of what makes the experience so memorable. Tsingpu has been designed around its setting rather than separated from it. The surrounding villages, food, tea, crafts and walks all become part of the stay. Instead of returning to a hotel at the end of an excursion and leaving the destination behind, the destination continues around you.
And that is what stayed with me about the tulou.
They are extraordinary architectural achievements, but their greatest fascination isn't really their walls. It is what those walls made possible: generations of families living together around a shared courtyard, protected from the outside world while remaining connected to it.
A few days earlier, we had been in the modern streets of Xiamen. Now we were sitting beside a river in the mountains, drinking tea and looking toward an earthen village that had been standing there for centuries.
The distance between those two experiences was only a few hours by car, but it felt much greater. Fujian contains both worlds—one racing toward the future, the other quietly carrying its past forward—and the tulou are where that contrast becomes impossible to miss.
When we finally left the mountains, I found myself thinking less about the tulou as monuments and more about the people who had continued to call them home. The walls may have been built centuries ago, but inside them, life had never really stopped.
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