Tianluokeng Village (Tianluokeng Tulou Cluster)

About the village

Tianluokeng village sits on the slopes of Hudong Mountain in Shuyang town, Nanjing County, in the Zhangzhou part of the tulou region. It is a single-clan Hakka settlement of the Huang family, whose ancestors moved here from Yongding in the late Yuan period. The cluster's five buildings, the square Buyun Lou of 1796 at the centre with four round and oval buildings around it, form the famous "four dishes and one soup" layout, completed over centuries with the last building, Wenchang Lou, finished in 1966. Inscribed on 7 July 2008 as part of the Fujian Tulou World Heritage property (site 1113-006), Tianluokeng has become the classic postcard image of the Hakka earthen buildings, photographed from hillside viewing platforms. For the diaspora it carries a plain and powerful story: a migrant Huang family raising ducks in a mountain pit who built, generation by generation, one of the world's most recognisable villages. Visitors today find Huang descendants still living and working in the buildings their forebears raised.