Majianglong village cluster, near Chikan Town, Kaiping, China

Rice harvest is laid out to dry while Bao’an diaolou looks on. The Majianglong village cluster is a collection of five small hamlets connected by shaded stone paths with mansions and watchtowers or Diaolou hidden in the foliage. The area was first settled in the mid-eighteenth century and is now a Unesco World Heritage site.

Although some diaolou date back as far as the 16th century most were built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to to guard against both bandits and periodic flooding. It s believed that about 3,000 were built originally, of these around 1,800 remain.