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Earth building form
Tulou is a collective building built with soil as the wall, which is round, semi-circular, square, quadrilateral, pentagonal, chair-shaped and dustpan-shaped. , and has its own characteristics. Tulou was square at first, with palace style, mansion style and different postures. It is not only strange, but also full of mystery, solid and firm. Accumulate food and raise livestock in the building; If there is a well and you need to guard against the enemy, you just need to close the gate and keep a few young people guarding it. Tulou is like a solid fortress, and women, children, old and young can sit back and relax. Because the square earth building is directional, the corner is dark, and the ventilation and lighting are different, Hakka people have designed a round earth building with good ventilation and lighting, which has no beginning and no end. Among the existing earth buildings, the round one is the most striking, which is called round building or round village by local people, followed by quadrangular buildings, such as the former residence of He Ziyuan, a veteran of the Revolution of 1911, the founder of modern education in China and the main ally of Jiaying House of the League.
The beautiful earth building of Hakka residence is a kind of collective building, and its biggest feature is its large shape. No matter from a distance or in front of us, the earth building is shocking with its huge single building, and its volume is the largest among the residential buildings. Among the earth buildings we visited, the most common round building is about 50 meters in diameter and three or four stories high. There are more than 100 houses, which can accommodate 30 to 40 families and 200 to 300 people. The Dayuan Building can reach 70-80 meters in diameter, with five or six floors and four or five hundred houses, which can accommodate seven or eight hundred people. Earth buildings and residential buildings reflect the folk customs of Hakka people living in compact communities.
From the research of history and architecture, the architectural style of tulou is a self-defense living style for national security. At that time, under the situation of Japanese invasion and civil war every year, Hakkas who moved their families traveled thousands of miles to other places and chose an architectural way conducive to family reunion and defense against war. The descendants of the same ancestor formed an independent society in a tulou, coexisting and sharing prosperity, and sharing death and humiliation. Therefore, restraint from the outside and cohesion from the inside are probably the most appropriate induction of tulou.
The wall of tulou is thicker under the wall and thinner on the top, and some of them are as high as 1.5 meters. When tamping, first dig a deep and large wall ditch at the foundation of the wall, tamp it, bury it with stones as the foundation, and then build it with stones and mortar. Then tamp the wall with sandwich panels. The raw material of the earth wall is mainly local clay red soil, mixed with appropriate amount of pebbles and lime, repeatedly pounded and stirred evenly to make the so-called "cooked soil". Some key parts should be mixed with appropriate amount of glutinous rice and brown sugar to increase their viscosity. When tamping, Chinese fir branches or bamboo pieces should be buried in the middle of the earth wall as "wall bones" to increase its tension. In this way, after repeated ramming, a steel-concrete earth wall was built, and a layer of lime was coated outside to prevent wind and rain erosion, so it was strong and abnormal, with good wind and earthquake resistance. According to Yongding County Records, a major earthquake occurred in 19 18, which rattled for 20 minutes during the day and continued to vibrate at night, but the earth building was intact.