Picture a giant ring of rammed earth, three or four storeys high, with almost no windows on the outside and a single heavy gate. Inside, galleries of wooden rooms face a courtyard with an ancestral hall at its heart, and up to several hundred members of one extended family once lived within those walls. That is a tulou, and the hills of south-western Fujian are dotted with them, round and square, some centuries old, many still inhabited.
The location here lies in the Hua'an area, where the Dadi group of tulou is listed alongside the better-known clusters in Yongding and Nanjing counties on the World Heritage list. Eryi Lou, one of the most celebrated, is a great double ring of earth and timber with beautifully painted interiors. These buildings were built mainly by Hakka and Minnan clans from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, part home, part fortress, in a region where banditry and feuds made defence a family matter. Their walls, made of earth mixed with lime, sand and sometimes sticky rice and sugar, have survived earthquakes that flattened modern buildings.
The landscape is a soft, green tangle of hills, bamboo groves, terraced fields and tea gardens. Anxi, the home of Tieguanyin oolong tea, lies not far to the east, and you will see the neat contour rows of tea bushes on many slopes. The roads are mountain roads in the Chinese sense: long, well-engineered stretches mixed with older, narrower lanes, frequent tunnels on new highways, and switchbacks through the valleys. Rain is frequent, especially in spring and early summer, and typhoons can reach this far inland in late summer.
A practical warning matters more here than anywhere: riding a foreign-registered motorcycle in China requires special permits, a Chinese licence or temporary permit, and usually an organised escort, and many cities restrict motorcycles. Most travellers come through a specialist tour operator or rent locally under supervision.
Small towns in the area have fuel stations, noodle shops and simple guesthouses, and some families rent rooms inside the tulou themselves. Sleeping within those earthen walls, hearing the courtyard wake up at dawn with cooking fires and chatter, is an experience you will not easily forget. Try the local tea, and ask before photographing inside a family's home.