Gaobei Village (Gaobei Tulou Cluster)

About the village

Gaobei Village, in Gaotou Township of Yongding District, is home to Chengqi Lou, the “King of Tulou”, long regarded as the most iconic and structurally complex of the circular earthen buildings. Construction began in 1628 (the first year of the Chongzhen reign) and was completed in 1709 (the 48th year of the Kangxi reign), taking the Jiang family 81 years and three to four generations to finish. The building grew into four concentric rings surrounding a central ancestral hall. The outer ring is variously reported as about 63–73 metres in diameter, stands four storeys tall, and contains 288 rooms (72 per floor). Across all of its inner rings, the complex is commonly described as having around 400 rooms in total, though some sources give slightly lower counts. At its peak, this massive “familial kingdom” housed many hundreds of Jiang clan members, with some accounts suggesting up to around 1,000 inhabitants. Chengqi Lou was inscribed in 2008 as part of the UNESCO Fujian Tulou World Heritage property (site 1113, Gaobei Tulou Cluster 1113‑003), making Gaobei a place of pilgrimage for Hakka families tracing Yongding ancestry, especially those of the Jiang surname. The village today welcomes steady numbers of visitors who come to walk the circular corridors and see a clan community still centred on its ancestral hall, with some families continuing to live within the complex. Its sheer scale gives diaspora visitors a vivid sense of how shared housing, defence, and lineage worship were bound together in one building.