The biggest feature of Tulou-style houses is that

The biggest feature of Tulou-style houses is defense.

Tulou refers to a type of building mainly distributed in southwestern Fujian that is suitable for large families to live in and has strong defensive properties. It uses earth, wood, stone and bamboo as the main building materials, and uses unbaked earth. It is mixed with a certain proportion of sandy clay and clayey sand and rammed with sandwich panels to form a house with more than two floors.

According to the explanation of "Modern Chinese Dictionary", the so-called "building" refers to "a house with two floors or more." According to this, a one-story house, even if it has raw earth walls as load-bearing walls and wood as columns and beams, cannot be called an earth building, but can only be called an earth house. Tulou is a unique large-scale residential form in the world and is known as the treasure of traditional Chinese residential buildings.

Tulou is a large-scale residential building that uses raw earth as the main building material, combines raw earth with wooden structures, and uses stone to varying degrees. Among them, the Fujian earth buildings are the ones with the widest distribution, the largest number, the richest categories, and the best preservation. There are more than 3,000 Fujian earth buildings that have been strictly recognized as earth buildings, mainly distributed in Yongding County, Longyan, Fujian Province, Nanjing County and Hua'an County, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province.

The birth of Tulou has a special historical background. Since the Tang and Song Dynasties, people who migrated south came to the mountainous areas with overlapping mountains and traffic congestion and took root here. They faced the contradiction between the Hokkien people and the Chaoshan people, the confrontation between the local rebels and the court, the armed fighting between families, rampant thieves, and wild beasts in the mountains.

In order for the family to survive here in a long-term and stable manner, they followed the rammed earth architectural form of the Central Plains and combined with the special local geographical environment to build earth buildings with both residential and defensive functions.

Tulou originated in the Song and Yuan Dynasties and matured in the late Ming Dynasty, Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China. The formation of earth buildings is related to several famous migrations of Han people in the Central Plains in history. During the Yongjia period of the Western Jin Dynasty, that is, the 4th century AD, there were frequent wars and natural disasters in the north. Local people migrated southward in large numbers, which kicked off the continuous migration of Han people from the Central Plains to Fujian for thousands of years.

The immigrants from the Central Plains who entered southern Fujian merged with the local residents, forming the Hoklo ethnic group characterized by the southern Fujian dialect; the Han people from the Central Plains who migrated through Ganzhou in Jiangxi and entered the mountains of western Fujian formed another ethnic group in Fujian. Important ethnic group - the Hakka ethnic group characterized by Hakka dialect.