The Ganlan wood building China vacation deals is the typical storied dwelling, which distributes mostly in the mountains of minority nationalities in the southwest semi-tropical areas. Such a style has pushed the space form and space combination of storied dwelling, the support, suspension and stagger floor along the hills, and, the techniques of mortise and tenon to a very high level. It also demonstrates rich material and spiritual civilizations in combination with the unique national and folk cultures of the minority nationalities.

Standing on a slope and supported by several wooden columns, these houses look precarious, but they are actually pretty stable and safe. They usually have two to three stories with a verandah. The ground floor is served as livestock sheds or storehouse for equipments and firewood; while the second floor and above is for family living.

The legend:When ancient Chinese pioneers moved from north to hilly southern China, they suffered a lot from the beasts, reptiles, and insects in the mountain forests. First they set fire to keep beasts away from colony, but people were still often bitten by snakes and scorpions. Then an old smart leader in the tribe invented what’s shown in the pictures above: Diaojiao Lou – Stiled Building.

The traditional typical wood Educational tours in China Ganlan buildings are all set up by wood including wood framework, wood purlin, plank wall, bark tile, with tenon and mortise at the link point, without any iron nail or iron hook. The plane of the house is rectangle, while the roof looks like double-slope shape, and the first two to three levels have no walls. The households live closely along the hillside.

In the Dai nationality autonomous counties in Xishuangbanna in the southwest of Yunnan and De Hong in the west of Yunnan, there are bamboo Ganlan buildings with a kind of bamboo-wood-combined structure using large amount of mao bamboos.

Compared with the wood one, the building material of bamboo dwelling are linked mostly by coir rope and 9 rattan; its roof is called Kongming’s Hat with swallowtailed Qianmu – some kind like the Xieshan-style (Roof of the Xieshan-style is composed of two big slopes at front and back and two small slopes at both sides, with two flats in the shape of isosceles triangle also being at both sides of the roof.) four-slope roof. The Jingpo nationality, Jinuo nationality, Hani nationality and other minority nationalities in this area mostly adopt the bamboo dwelling. Their dwellings are alike in terms of the height of overhead level, whether they being paired up with the architecture materials (such as adobe, day lily, the tile top, etc.) and the worshiped totem except for The drum tower at Ma’an Village, Sanjiang County, Guangxi.

The slight differences. There are some other unique features of China Photo Tour Yunnan’s bamboo stockaded village, such as the Dais stockaded village, each of which has a well with painstaking decorations around or even with well pavilion or guardian stone-carving beast. Another example is the stockaded village gate of Hani nationality, which is always made of tree trunk and set in the entrance with fur on the cross wood and later bird carving instead. After numerous textual researches, Kenzaburo Torikoshi, the Japanese expert figured out that the traditional torii is derived from Yunnan.

In addition, according to the building origin, fundamental framework and space idea, the Diaojiao building seen in the Mount Emei area in the southwest of Sichuan, Chongqing area and Fenghuang mountainous and lake areas in the west of Hunan Province are all the specific models of storied dwelling. Dwelling in trees and dwelling in caves are both the most original modalities of Chinese traditional vernacular dwelling, which was once concluded by the ancient as “dwelling in trees in the south and caves in the north”. The historical records and archaeological studies have fully proved that the ganlan wood building was once widely adopted in the areas south of Yangtze River, most of which are areas of mountains and hills with the humid, hot and rainy climate, the ecological resource of dense woods, the production mode of paddy cultivations. In ancient times, these regions were known as Yues as a whole. The dwelling culture of Ganlan is the common feature of Yues, and, the totem, courtyard, entrance and the subdivision of structure and materials together with the unique customs of all minorities, were passed on and formed such rich residential dwelling settlements in today’s southern areas especially the southwest.

It is worth mentioning that with the growing population, declining wood resources, the popularization of architectural materials like brick and tile and some other factors, the Han nationality in the south and the minorities in the plains have increasingly farewell the Ganlan wood buildings, and progressed to many variations and new modalities, such as the water street dwelling in Zhejiang Province, the courtyard-style dwelling in Anhui Proivince, the adobe building in the south of Fujian Province, Yi Ke Yin in Kunming and so on.

Southwestern minority ethnics people are not only great architectures but also creative artists. They like to carve, shape or decorate their house into beautiful living galleries. If you are planning to make a trip to southwestern China, don’t forget to visit these wonderful diaojiaolou villages.

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