About two hours east of Chaozhou, there is a small village called Sanrao. You can get there by local bus, but you have to change once on the way. There are no tour buses.
I arrived there, and got a lift on a motorbike to the edge of the village. When the guy dropped me off at my destination, he gestured at the building, shrugged and said, "You came to see this? For us, it's just here. We never come to visit this place."
Daoyunlou is a communal house of a type that was typically built by the Hakka, an ethnic minority in southern China. It is not the biggest in the country - those are a few hours down the road, and UNESCO-listed - but it is still impressive, and it is apparently the largest such octagonal building in the country. It was constructed over 400 years ago, and even in the 1960s as many as 600 people lived together in this space. There are still around 100 people who live here and call it home.
When I went there it was early afternoon and dripping hot. Daoyunlou was silent, but felt alive. There were motorbikes parked in the central courtyard, and chickens pecking between the grass. Occasionally a door opened and a man would emerge, get on his motorbike and zoom away. When I climbed to the top storey, I could hear the hushed sound of babies crying, and scolding parents. Then silence again. I was the only visible person.
I stood at the top, hot and out of breath, and it seemed to me that this building was a UFO that had been dropped here, and that the local people had not noticed, that in fact no one had noticed, not tourists, not the government, not local historians. In truth, Daoyunlou is not by any means undiscovered - at the tiny visitor centre in the middle, I had been shown a short, Chinese-language documentary about the building, and the only reason I knew about it in the first place was because of a few lines in the Lonely Planet - but it is perhaps the first time I have been somewhere with such apparent historical value, and felt like the only person who thought it was in any way special.
I started to wonder about what makes people start and stop valuing things. For some undefined period in its 400 year history, Daoyunlou had meant a great deal to the people who lived there. It had been a home, and a fortress, and a community. They had built it from nothing, embellished it, and filled the space with their lives. They had passed it on to their children, who in turn had passed it on to their children. Now, everyone is leaving, and the building looks tumble-down and unloved. How did this happen?
At this point I entered the realm of pure speculation, far removed from the realities of life in Daoyunlou, which I do not understand, never having spoken to the people who live there. Nevertheless, I speculated. What if the original owners had been removed, and the space handed over to outsiders? What if the outsiders felt completely disconnected from the building's history, and therefore did not value it? What if the outsiders had been treated as custodians rather than owners, and had therefore been denied the chance to invest in the building, both emotionally and financially?
This may not be the history of Daoyunlou, but it is certainly what happened elsewhere in China, and it could explain how something that had once been a source of pride could, in a short space of time, become a ruin. When an object is stripped of its sentimental value by being confiscated from its owner, and when economic value is denied, what other value is there? All that is left is an object's most basic utility - a house as somewhere you live and nothing more.
The value of any object is not fixed, rather it depends on the sense of ownership that someone has towards it. Even the rarest and most unique objects lose their value in the hands of people who do not know how to treasure them. I fear this is the legacy that China is still dealing with.
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