The search for the picture perfect Hakka earth buildings

Hakka earth buildings (tulou), originally uploaded by fangie2000.

These fortresses built by the early Hakka settlers in Fujian was to be the main highlight of my southern China trip. So I was adamant in getting to the right ones - pretty, rustic ones set in the mountains, without the bus loads of tourists and souvenir shops taking over the earth buildings of the village folks.

Lonely Planet China proved to be an unsuitable guide to my quest, being sketchy on how to get there. And contrary to it, frequent buses do run to many of the villages where you can find these buildings, termed tulou in Mandarin.

The best source of information on backpacking in China is actually the travel forums of the Chinese people, the prerequisite being able to read Chinese. And I found my answer in baidu.com's equivalent of Yahoo! Answers.

With the benefit of hindsight, and advice from my Xiamen friends, a good jumping point to the villages would by the county of Nanjing (南靖, 2 hours and less than 30RMB by bus from Xiamen), where bus connections to the villages, less than 2 hours journey and costing about 20RMB, could be found.

I based myself in this village called Taxia (塔下), staying in a well-maintained, clean and beautiful earth building guesthouse called Weiqunlou Kezhan (literally meaning Apron Building Guesthouse, wqlkz.com). Having heard about how bad sanitation could be in the villages, this condition of this guesthouse was well beyond my expectation and at a reasonable price (120RMB for 2). The shared common bathrooms are clean with hot showers, bedroom is big and comfortable with quilt blankets to keep out the cold during winter. The owner of the building is a retired teacher from the village, while the guesthouse is maintained by his younger son, a village teacher. Both are very friendly and help to arrange for tours to nearby villages at honest price. Meals there are a little bit pricey though.

The small village of Taxia itself is very dainty, with a stream running through it. There are several round/square/rectangular earth buildings in the village, and a quiet temple on the hill slope.

From this village, we hire a motobike at 120RMB for a day, with the driver bringing us to visit 4 equally beautiful villages nearby. Not to be missed is Tianluokeng (田螺坑, pictured above), which is tiny village set among the paddy fields (but avoid taking meals there, our driver told us the restaurants there are notorious for charging tourists exorbitant prices).

Another pretty and rather unspoilt village is Hekeng (河坑), about 5km from Taxia. It features more earth buildings set in seven star constellation position.

How to find the right bus connections? The easiest way is to decide on the guesthouse you're staying, and call them for the bus schedule. That's what I did, as they have all the bus schedules to their village at the back of their mind, and even help to ask the bus driver to reserve better seats for us (otherwise, we may have to end up sitting on stools placed on floorboard if all the seats are taken). If you miss the direct bus connections, it is possible to take the next bus to another village and transfer to your destination on motorbike. The village roads are not busy and so pretty safe.

The main barrier to all these is language, as many do not speak or understand English.