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An hour's bus ride east of Yongding via the crossroads town of Zhiling , you'll find what is considered the most perfect Hakka roundhouse 5km north of HUKENG village. Known as Zhencheng Lou , this century-old home is now a well-maintained if slightly sterile tourist attraction (Y25): plain and forbidding on the outside, the huge outer wall encloses three storeys of galleried rooms looking inwards to a central courtyard, where guests were entertained and containing the clan shrine. The galleries are vertically divided into eight segments by thick fire walls , a plan that intentionally turns the building into a giant bagua , Taoism's eight-trigram symbol. This powerful design occurs everywhere in the region, along with demon-repelling mirrors and other Taoist motifs. An unintentional - and almost disastrous - consequence of the design was that the first US satellite photos of the region identified the houses as missile silos. The hamlet surrounding Zhencheng is quite attractive in itself, with other, more "authentic" houses (all still lived in) laid out along a small stream. Those worth investigating include an 1920s schoolhouse; Fuyu Lou , the old yamen building; Rushen , one of the smallest multistorey roundhouses; and Kuijiu , a splendid, 160-year-old square-sided Hakka mansion, its interior like a temple squeezed into a box. There's also a small, white-tiled roundhouse hotel (Y80) if you want to stay longer, and you might ask about getting 20km farther north to CHENGQI , where Gaotou Lou is the largest roundhouse of them all, built in 1709 with its six hundred rooms currently home to more than a thousand people. Heading on to Guangdong from Hukeng, catch transport back to Zhiling, which lies on the junction of roads to Guangdong from Longyan and Yongding, from where you should be able to flag down buses for the five-hour trip to Meizhou or Dapu until mid-morning.
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