The culture of the Lu Mansion architecture in China's Kaiping County, 1900-1949

Abstract

Kaiping County of Guangdong Province in China is a very well-known hometown of many overseas Chinese since the beginning of the 20th Century. At that time, the rural area of Kaiping was badly ravaged by bandits and natural disasters, especially floods. Following the local tradition, some villagers who came back from overseas countries decided to protect themselves against bandits and floods by building multi-storey fortified village houses, known as "diaolou" (碉樓). Meanwhile, people also built traditional dwellings as well as village villas combining Chinese and Western architectural features, known as lu mansion (廬). As a result, the local village landscape became very different，in fact quite unique and was inscribed on the UNESCO world cultural heritage list.

This thesis focuses on one of the architectural typologies, lu mansion, which was usually constructed in the late 1920s and 1930s by the returning overseas Chinese. Most lu mansions were developed locally from the traditional Lingnan two-bay three-corridor village house form. Compared to other architectural types in Kaiping, the lu mansion has bigger windows, bigger living rooms, bigger bedrooms; better ventilation, good drainage systems, nice ample balconies and more decoration. In other words, the lu mansion was designed for more comfortable living.

The underlying significance of the architecture of the lu mansions is that it is an expression and reflection of a human condition during a specific socio-historical context. The social-cultural forces are of primary importance in understanding the architectural form and meaning of the lu mansion – a vernacular house form of Kaiping – in terms of how it relates to the socio-cultural setting of the Overseas Chinese who created it during the 1920s and 1930s.