China · 19th century
Yanxiang Lou ranks #8,892 of 9,040 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #95 of the 103 mapped in China. Founded 1842, it is older than 9% of the atlas's dated landmarks, one of 705 atlas entries founded in the 19th century. 3 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. See how China compares in the castle statistics.
Yanxiang Lou is located in Xinnan village, Hukeng town, Yongding district, Longyan city, Fujian province, China. On 20 January 2001 it was announced as a cultural relic protection unit of Fujian province. In 2008 it was inscribed as a World Heritage Site as one of the typical representatives of the Fujian tulou. On 5 March 2013 it was announced as one of the seventh batch of Major Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the National Level.
Yanxiang Lou was built during the Daoguang era of the Qing (1842); it is a circular tulou, the building's diameter being 40 metres, four storeys high, with 34 rooms on each floor, 136 rooms in all, constructed on the pattern of the eight trigrams. The inner court of the building imitates mansion-style architecture, with the ancestral hall in the centre; the building is surrounded by an enclosing wall on the outside, and on the western side a two-storey schoolhouse was built. Yanxiang Lou is the dwelling of members of the Su clan, its name being taken from "may descendants multiply and prosper, may the scholarly family tradition be handed down through the generations".
Machine-translated from “衍香楼” on the Chinese Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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