# Fujian Tulou



## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

Source : http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1113

Fujian Tulou is a property of 46 buildings constructed between the 15th and 20th centuries over 120 km in south-west of Fujian province, inland from the Taiwan Strait. Set amongst rice, tea and tobacco fields the Tulou are earthen houses. Several storeys high, they are built along an inward-looking, circular or square floor plan as housing for up to 800 people each. They were built for defence purposes around a central open courtyard with only one entrance and windows to the outside only above the first floor. Housing a whole clan, the houses functioned as village units and were known as “a little kingdom for the family” or “bustling small city.” They feature tall fortified mud walls capped by tiled roofs with wide over-hanging eaves. The most elaborate structures date back to the 17th and 18th centuries. The buildings were divided vertically between families with each disposing of two or three rooms on each floor. In contrast with their plain exterior, the inside of the tulou were built for comfort and were often highly decorated. They are inscribed as exceptional examples of a building tradition and function exemplifying a particular type of communal living and defensive organization, and, in terms of their harmonious relationship with their environment, an outstanding example of human settlement.


By *yochan * from dchome :


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## alanna08 (Dec 20, 2008)

Nice photos, thank you for sharing.


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

*Visitors marvel at homes made of sugar and rice
Unesco puts ancient buildings on heritage list*
3 January 2009
The Times

Chickens peck their way around satellite dishes that battle for space with pig pens and wood-fired stoves in the courtyard of Mr Jiang's earthen clanhouse, one of the most extraordinary buildings in China.

US intelligence once mistook the sturdy edifices, mostly built in a circle resembling a doughnut, for missile silos strategically hidden in the remote hills of southeastern Fujian province. Further research revealed that the "silos" were the ancient fortified homes of the Hakka, a fishing people who sought safety from persecution in this inaccessible corner of the country.

After centuries of quiet obscurity, the "tulou" — earthen buildings — have gained prominence since Unesco added 46 of the structures to its world heritage list this year.

The Government fought for years to gain the listing and now tourists are pouring in.

Almost as quickly, the residents are moving out. With rising living standards, descendants of the clans that built the dwellings from a packed mix of sand, earth, mud and pebbles bound together with glutinous rice and brown sugar are building new brick-and-tile homes in nearby villages.

It is an exodus that disturbs Jiang Deqing, the chief of the Chengqilou tulou that once housed more than 100 people and now is home to only 32 — mostly elderly and young children. Mr Jiang said: "If anyone can afford to, then they move out.

They want homes with lavatories and bigger rooms." Without inhabitants, the tulou deteriorate rapidly. Next door stands the Wuyunlou, its four-storey front wall cracked and buckling. Inside, wooden poles provide a flimsy buttress. A notice at the door forbids visitors from entering or climbing the steep stairs in case the structure crumbles.

But three old people still live inside. Mr Jiang said: "The Government begs them to leave but this is their home and they want to stay." He hopes that the 600-year-old tulou, among the oldest of the houses built between 1300 and the 1960s, will be among the first to benefit from restoration after the world heritage listing.

Xi Songying, 71, tells of his pride in his 376-year-old clan home. Only eight families remain in the ruins that once housed more than 300 people. "The Government wants us to sell, but we refuse. We have always lived here." The younger generation is far less sentimental. From Qing Lian's three-storey brick house she can look down on the circular tulou that was her home for decades.

"It was so inconvenient and dirty. My daughters have built this house where we have a bathroom on every floor. Only people without money still live down there." This poses a dilemma for the Government, which is eager to preserve the buildings but lacks the resources to maintain them — there are 20,000 in Yongding county alone — and cannot force residents to stay.

The risk is that the tulou will soon be nothing more than museums.

Even if the ancient tulou cannot all survive, the Chinese architect firm Urbanus may have found a way to preserve the style. It is building a tulou affordable housing project in the southern city of Guangzhou.

The circular structure will house 245 apartments, a dormitory, small hotel, shops and even a gym.

Urbanus believes that the distinctive shape provides an alternative to the ubiquitous urban blocks.

The tulou buildings in Fujian province once housed hundreds of people each. Now they contain a few dozen at most as more people opt for modern homes.


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *vwpentax * from dchome :


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

Source : http://www.willkwan.net


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

*A sight for poor spies *
15 March 2009
Sun Herald

China

Sally Hammond visits the Fujian houses that baffled the US in the Cold War.

Our guide points to the crone seated just inside the doorway, grinning toothlessly at us. "See that old lady? She's 90." Ancient as she is, the amazing "house that is a village" we have just entered is far older. In fact, some of its doughnut-shaped earthen buildings were built as long as 700 years ago, by Mongolian refugees who, after many years of searching, chose to settle in the fertile valleys of China's Fujian Province.

Here, in these impregnable rammed-earth houses topped with black terracotta tiles, life began again. At an altitude of 800 metres, the cool climate was perfect to grow cabbages and persimmons, tea and turnips. Little did they realise that, centuries later, their unique architecture would almost spark an international incident.

In 1985, with the Cold War still front and centre, these strange square and ring-shaped structures looked sinister enough on the US surveillance satellite to rattle the White House. After all, they were hidden in valleys directly inland from Taiwan. The US government sent in spies to check out the "group nuclear base".

Today, there is a smooth new highway to Yongding from Xiamen, a tourist island and bustling city on the coast south of Shanghai. Delightfully relaxed and dotted with lakes and waterways, Yongding is one of China's smaller cities, with a population of just 5million. It is almost within sight of Taiwan. In fact, you can just see one of the archipelago's outlying islands a few kilometres offshore.

By coach, it is a comfortable four-hour trip. But the US investigators had to trek in over mountains to see and photograph the evidence - only to leave swiftly, embarrassed.

If our welcome was anything to go by, on entering each "reactor" they would have been offered a cup of green tea, while the only weapons they would have found were knives and cleavers used to dispatch chickens and pigs for the cooking pot. The clay courtyard of the four-storey earthen fortresses would have been filled with fluffy yellow ducklings, toddlers and people going about their daily business.

Warfare was the furthest thing from the minds of these peaceful inhabitants.

To visit a "tulou", 46 of which were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list last year, is to step through a portal into another culture, another time. Big enough for up to a thousand people, each "house" is a complete village, usually accommodating an entire clan .

Outside, on concrete slabs, chillies, corn, mushrooms, persimmons and rosellas are drying in the sunshine, while slender heads of cabbage hang on a fence.

As we clamber up the shaky stairs from the ground floor, which is reserved for communal activities, past the second floor used for storage to the accommodation level, I feel for the elderly who have yet another staircase to manage - inexplicably, the fourth (and top) floor is reserved for them.

Downstairs, we sample some of the locally grown tea and marvel over a bottle of strong spirit filled with enormous bumblebees. "Drink it. Good for the knees!" we are exhorted. Maybe we'd need to if we had to manage those stairs every day.

Then came an offer too good to refuse.

Hokkien (Hakka) is the cuisine of Taiwan, though it is perhaps better known as a staple in the hawker food of Singapore and Malaysia. Many Chinese emigrated en masse from Fujian Province in the 19th century - ironically because of famine - and their simple peasant dishes, rich in soy sauce and duck, became the foundation of the popular "nonya" food, which grew out of the intermarriages with Malays.

We lunch in a small room outside the tulou. The plates come constantly: eggplant and red hot chillies, pork belly bathed in oily turnip broth, sweet potato chips dusted with sugar, fried whitebait, cold poached duck - all fried, all delicious and, finally, all too much.

You could be forgiven for thinking the original builders of the tulou were themselves frustrated chefs. To form the metre-thick walls, local red soil was first mixed with sand and stone and then glutinous rice, brown sugar and egg whites, making a mix stronger than concrete, even before it was reinforced with bamboo.

The balconies that run along each floor create an atrium overlooking the central area. Most tulous were built with a single gate, for security, and had a source of water inside, as well as waste disposal. Often a temple stands in the centre, for these people brought their Confucian and Daoist beliefs with them.

There are so many tulous in the area - the more elaborate ones date from the 17th and 18th centuries - that you could spend days exploring them. We visit another one in a delightful village called Taxii. Here, while there are some tulous, most people live in almost European-style houses overlooking the water.

In the late afternoon as we stroll along the path beside the river, we nod and smile at the locals seated outside their homes, smoking and relaxing with their families. Occasionally, we step aside for a cyclist, or a farm truck returning home, and once a shiny black sedan pushes importantly through.

In this remote part of China, it seems ludicrous to imagine satellites and nuclear reactors. But then to people who build with brown sugar and egg white, maybe not.

The writer travelled as a guest of Helen Wong's Tours.

TRIP NOTES

* Getting there Singapore Airlines flies from Sydney to Shanghai 24 times a week. Fares start from $811 plus taxes. Yongding is a four-hour coach ride from Xiamen. Helen Wong's Tours (02 9267 7833, see helenwongstours.com) has a six-day Fujian Province tour from April, for groups of two or more, for $1650 a person, twin share, land only.

* Staying there Overnight, before the tour starts, Central Hotel Shanghai. It's adjacent to the Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall. See centralhotelshanghai.com.

* Further information See travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/fujian


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *cookiecat * from dchome :


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *WICKY276 * from dchome :


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *黑仔送 * from dchome :





































http://www.dchome.net/attachments/day_090702/20090702_ac41baa57f1adb3fa40aUy6HfEOXSk7k.jpg

[img]http://www.dchome.net/attachments/day_090702/20090702_a2c6aa2b9491f680354beaYLK3OjhIWK.jpg


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## ainttelling (Jun 3, 2009)

Reminds me of proto-cities of the Andronovo culture.










[Source].


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *garylee78 * from a Hong Kong photography forum :


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

All photos : http://www.fotop.net/ckchan123/Fujian_Tulou


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## Concrete Stereo (May 21, 2005)

wow, very interesting typology


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *chiulkc* from a Hong Kong discussion forum :


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

Source : http://www.fotop.net/ghost


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

Source : http://www.pbase.com/cykbertha/tulou


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## cc80cc80 (Jan 16, 2009)

Very interesting, and nice picture.


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

Source : http://www.pbase.com/stephen_leung/fujiantulou


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

Source : http://www.pbase.com/jackskwan/fujian_tulo


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *闲人白开水* from a  Chinese photography forum :


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## hmmwv (Jul 19, 2006)

Nice, I always wanted to visit the Tulou.


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## skyscraper03 (Feb 12, 2005)

Very interesting


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

*In a Chinese building, a village *
The traditional homes, now being abandoned, reflect fading clan culture 
24 March 2011
International Herald Tribune

The gargantuan buildings are so iconic that they appear on a Chinese stamp. The most famous have distinctive round shapes, appearing from a distance like flying saucers that have plopped down in the middle of farm fields. Some were reportedly mistaken for missile silos by U.S. officials poring over satellite images.

But the thousands of earthen buildings here, built by the ethnic Hakka and Minnan people of rural Fujian Province, are actually the ultimate architectural expression of clan existence in China.

For centuries, each building, called tulou in Mandarin Chinese, would house an entire clan, virtually a village. Everyone living inside would have the same surname, except for those who had married into the clan. The tulou usually tower four floors and have as many as hundreds of rooms that open out onto a vast central courtyard.

The outer walls, made of rammed earth, protected against bandits, with many of the walls square-shaped and resembling medieval keeps. With stockpiles of food, people could live for months without setting foot outside the tulou. But as China’s clan traditions unravel, more and more people are moving out of the tulou to live in modern apartments with conveniences absent from the earthen buildings — indoor toilets, for example.

The construction of tulou ended in the last century, and the art of building them is fading.

And some scholars contend that Chinese officials — though they tout the tulou as tourist attractions and President Hu Jintao visited them during the 2010 Lunar New Year festivities — have done little to systematically preserve the buildings or modernize them so people will continue living in them.

‘‘People don’t clean it anymore,’’ Jiang Qing, 28, said as she stood on an upper balcony in Huan Xing tulou, whose name means ‘‘embracing prosperity.’’ ‘‘As long as people live here, the ecosystem thrives. Once people move out, then it all falls apart.’’

Huan Xing is a typical tulou in Yongding County. It is 500 years old and has wooden pillars along the balconies that were erected long ago at leaning angles to give the structure greater strength. Huan Xing once housed 100 families, but only 10 or so people live here now.

The elderly residents shuffle back and forth, cooking in kitchens on the first floor or sitting around the central courtyard chatting. One afternoon, they were moving firewood stacked outside the front entrance of the tulou to nearby storage sheds; the local government had asked them to do this to hide the messy stacks from tourists.

The young have all moved out. Many live two hours away in the coastal city of Xiamen, where they largely do menial work.

Ms. Jiang, the mother of a 3-year-old, moved here from another village when she married into the Li clan. She was used to tulou living; she had grown up in a square-shaped one herself. She and her husband recently moved out of Huan Xing to an apartment with running water and indoor plumbing. Her husband’s parents still live in a ramshackle tulou across the street.

‘‘People used to live in the tulou for safety, but that’s not needed anymore,’’ said the husband, Li Jingan, 28, a restaurant owner. ‘‘When you’re young, you like the community in the tulou. But when you’re older, you appreciate the better standard of living outside.’’

Unesco, the U.N. agency that oversees cultural preservation, declared 46 tulou together to be a World Heritage Site in 2008. A Unesco museum in one of the tulou says the structures were built from the 13th century to the 20th century. One exhibit says there are 30,000 tulou in Fujian Province, more than 20,000 of those in Yongding County.

But Huang Hanmin, a scholar of the tulou who lives in Fujian, said there were many myths about the tulou, including the number. According to his research, there are only 3,000 tulou in the province, a figure echoed by the Global Heritage Fund, a California-based preservation organization that has a tulou project.

Mr. Huang said that about 1,100 tulou were round — the kind that appear on stamps, postcards and tourism posters — and that the rest were square or rectangular.

Another myth, he said, is that the tulou were all built by the Hakka, called kejiaren in Mandarin Chinese, meaning ‘‘guest people.’’ They are called guests because they began migrating to southern China from the Yellow River basin in the fourth century to escape war and natural disasters.

Linguists say the Hakka language is closer to the ancient Chinese of the Yellow River area, considered the birthplace of Chinese civilization, than any other language spoken today. Many of the Hakka settled in Fujian Province and Guangdong Province. In the hilly terrain of Fujian, rife with bandits and with locals hostile to the ‘‘guests,’’ they built the tulou.

Mr. Huang said the locals, who mostly speak a language called Minnan, constructed many tulou for security.

‘‘Historically, the Hakka people and Minnan people didn’t live peacefully side by side,’’ he said. ‘‘So safety became a paramount issue.’’

‘‘The Minnan ones are older, and there are probably more of them,’’ he added.

The Minnan people also built some of the largest tulou, with diameters of about 160 meters, or 525 feet.

The Chinese government tried smashing the clan system during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976. Collectives built more and more tulou and randomly assigned people to live in the buildings, so that each clan would have members spread among different collectives. When the Cultural Revolution ended, people drifted back to their clans.

Perhaps the most famous tulou is the 17th-century Chengqilou, which has striking concentric rings of homes and alleys on its ground floor and was visited by Mr. Hu. Its diameter is about 100 meters, and it has 402 rooms. (The smallest tulou in Fujian has 16 rooms.) Fifteen generations have lived in it. Four brothers together built the Chengqilou for their families; it took four years to build, one year for each floor.

In the center is an ancestral altar, which is common in tulou. The inner ring of buildings once housed classrooms, but now children go outside for school. The next ring has 36 meeting rooms. The outermost ring is the main residential section. In a design typical of tulou, that ring’s towering walls have kitchens and animal stalls on the ground floor, storage rooms on the second and homes on the third and fourth floors. Water is drawn from two wells. The people here are surnamed Jiang, and their ancestors migrated from Henan Province.

The migration continues today, as the younger ‘‘guest people’’ leave to find employment.

‘‘A lot of people have gone elsewhere, Hong Kong, other places — they’re everywhere,’’ said Li Jiulan, a 53-year-old woman who has lived in Chengqilou for 32 years. ‘‘But it doesn’t matter if young people don’t live here. The older people are still here.’’

Mr. Huang, the scholar, had a different perspective: ‘‘What they’ve preserved is just the structure, but the people have all moved out,’’ he said. ‘‘So the living part has died. You’re just preserving a relic.’’


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## HOLABETO (Apr 1, 2007)

great! this scene looks like it was taken out from a samurai game


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *独自欣赏* from a Chinese photography forum :


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

*Hakka heritage stages a show of force*
Updated: 2011-02-11 
China Daily

Since the tulou - the earthen communal houses of the Hakka people - were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2008, they have become iconic attractions of Southeast China's Fujian province.

Those who aren't able to visit can still come to understand and appreciate its cultural essence through the stage show Verve of Tulou, created and performed by artists from Fujian's Yongding county.

The Hakka built the province's tulou between the 15th and the 20th centuries. The Hakka people is said to have migrated as war refugees from Central China. Yongding, which hosts 20,000 of the structures, has since come to be known as the "hometown of tulou".

Characterized by their circular - occasionally square - floor plans, tulou are usually several stories high and face inward toward a central courtyard.

A tulou is usually home to a single extended family, or clan, which may number up to 800 individuals.

The buildings are accessed through a single entrance and have no windows facing the outside on the ground level - security measures to keep out bandits.

According to UNESCO's description of tulou, "they stand as exceptional examples of a building tradition that exemplify a particular type of communal living, as well as a type of structure built for communal defense. They are an outstanding example of human settlement that harmoniously blends with their environment."

This is the essence that is captured in the presentation of tulou and Hakka culture in Verve of Tulou.

The show also portrays the development of the tulou and the Hakka migration that brought them to Yongding.

The five acts that present about a dozen Hakka songs and dances, and feature traditional attire, offer a holistic presentation of life in the county.

Hakka heritage stages a show of force

It also conveys the story of the Hakka diaspora overseas.

After their migration to Central China, many Hakka emigrated across the globe, with most moving to Southeast Asia, North America and Europe. This chapter of their legacy is represented in the show's Overseas Traces act.

Since its 2009 premier, Verve of Tulou has toured the provincial capital Fuzhou and Xiamen city, and has also been staged in Taiwan, where it aroused powerful feelings of nostalgia among the many Hakka residents.


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## erbse (Nov 8, 2006)

What an awesome place. :drool: Looks like some parts are in need of renovation though. Anything happening in that regard?


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

erbse said:


> What an awesome place. :drool: Looks like some parts are in need of renovation though. Anything happening in that regard?


I visited a cluster of them last year and many were still inhabited. However, the buildings were nowhere near falling apart although the facilities are not exactly modern.

My photos : http://www.globalphotos.org/xiamen.htm


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *简简 * from a Chinese photography forum :


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

Photo taken on June. 6, 2010 shows the Dadi Tulou, earth buildings in Chinese, in Hua'an County, southeast China's Fujian Province. Built on a base of stone, the thick walls of Tulou were packed with dirt and fortified with wood or bamboo internally. The architectural arts of the Fujian Tulou can be traced back nearly 1,000 years, and their design incorporates the tradition of fengshui (favorable siting within the environment). (Photo: china.org.cn)


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## khoojyh (Aug 14, 2005)

Love Hakka Tulou. US military though Tulou is PLA nuclear launch site at the first they saw Tulou. Haha....


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *好摄友* from a Chinese photography forum :


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## balthazar (Jul 19, 2007)

:cheers: these buildings are amazing


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

O & 口 by kymak, on Flickr


OOO by kymak, on Flickr


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *lawc* from dcfever :


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *小实头* from a Chinese photography forum :


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

By *一依* from a Chinese photography forum :


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

Chaoyang Lou 朝陽樓 by A. Wee, on Flickr


Interior of Zhencheng Lou 振成樓 by A. Wee, on Flickr


Lanterns in Zhencheng Lou 振成樓 by A. Wee, on Flickr


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## hmelissa (Aug 5, 2013)

Hong Kong is very interesting. I want to go there. This mysterious city for me.


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

tulou_sunset3_a_2k by oldbass007, on Flickr


yuchanglou_bw by oldbass007, on Flickr


tuloudongtian_bw by oldbass007, on Flickr


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