The walled houses, and what they are called at home

The same family house is called a tulou in Fujian, a tuweizi, an earthen enclosure, in Jiangxi, a four-cornered tower in northern Guangdong, a weilongwu in eastern Guangdong, a shime in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and a huofang in Taiwan. The name changes with the province because the building does change with the province, and the difference is not decorative. In Jiangxi, in the southern counties of Ganzhou, the classic form is a square enclosure with a single gate, an inner courtyard, and rooms running round the walls, with the ancestral hall at the centre.

The Hakka built for defence and for a household large enough to need separation and privacy at the same time. The enclosure collects bedrooms, a courtyard, kitchen, a training room, an armoury, and a shrine for the ancestors into a single walled compound with one way in. That combination of military precaution and genealogical order is what the building is actually about, and it is why the house is read as a social document rather than as a picturesque form.

The name Hakka comes from the guest system of the Wei, Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties and the client households of the Tang and Song, and the people who took it up in the early Qing were first an appellation used by others, in the Siyi region of Guangdong, before it became a name the people took for themselves. The speakers spread through the south of Jiangxi, and in Ganzhou most of the county territory speaks Hakka rather than the Gan speech of the rest of the province. Reading a walled house as a migration record rather than a building type keeps the province's history in the frame.