The diaolou towers scattered through Taishan's villages are the architectural legacy of overseas Chinese remittances. These multi-storey fortified structures combine Cantonese defensive building traditions with the Western ornamental styles that emigrants encountered in California and Canada, producing a hybrid that is unique to this corner of Guangdong. Taishan's towers are less concentrated and less photographed than the UNESCO-listed clusters in neighbouring Kaiping, but they are also less manicured and more genuinely encountered as working parts of the landscape.
The best approach is to rent a bicycle or hire a driver for a half-day and explore the villages northwest of Taicheng, where towers appear at the edge of rice paddies and in village centres with casual regularity. Many are abandoned and slowly subsiding into the subtropical vegetation; others are still inhabited by elderly residents. The contrast between the Baroque cornices and the surrounding agricultural landscape is consistently startling.