Chen Tianming and his rickety multi-storey house in Xingyi, China. Chen, resentful of what he considered a poor amount of compensation when the local government ordered his village and home demolished to make way for a planned resort, began expanding the house that his farming parents built in the 1980s by adding floors. Now there are 11. Photo / Andrea Verdelli, the New York Times
The structure teeters over fields of knee-high grass, looking like a cross between a camping tent and a giant wedding cake.
Eleven storeys of dark red wooden rooms, diminishing in size as they ascend, balance atop one another, seemingly held together by only the thicket of cords that stretches from the peak to the ground.
Inside feels no less precarious. The ceilings are propped up with repurposed utility poles. Power strips and wires dangle from low-hanging beams.
Giant buckets of rainwater help support the weight of the structure. The homemade ladders that connect the floors perch at steep angles, often without handrails at the side.
Chen Tianming — the tower’s 43-year-old designer, builder, and resident — does not need them anyway.
He climbed lightly up the ladders, past the fifth-floor reading nook and the sixth-floor open-air tearoom.
From the ninth floor, he surveyed the sturdy, standardised apartment buildings in the distance where his neighbours live.
“They say the house is shabby, that it could be blown down by wind at any time,” he said — an observation that did not seem altogether far-fetched when I visited him last month.
“But the advantage is that it’s conspicuous, a bit eye-catching. People admire it,” he added.
“Other people spend millions, and no one goes to look at their houses.”
Chen’s house is so unusual that it has lured gawkers and even tourists to his rural corner of Guizhou province, in southwestern China.
It evokes a Dr Seuss drawing, or the Burrow in Harry Potter. Many people on Chinese social media have compared it to Howl’s Moving Castle.
To the casual observer, the house may be a mere spectacle, a Frankensteinian oddity.
To Chen, it is a monument to his determination to live where — and how — he wants, in defiance of the local government, gossiping neighbours and seemingly even common sense.
He began modifying his family home in 2018, when the authorities in the city of Xingyi ordered his village demolished to make way for a resort they planned to build.
Chen’s parents, farmers who had built the house in the 1980s, thought that the money that officials were offering as compensation for the move was too low and refused to leave.
When bulldozers began razing their pomegranate trees anyway, Chen rushed home from Hangzhou, the eastern city where he had been working as a package courier.
Along with his brother, Chen Tianliang, he started adding a third floor. At first, the motivation was in part practical: Compensation payment was determined by square footage, and if the house had more floors, they would be entitled to more money.
They visited a second-hand building materials market and bought old utility poles and red composite boards — cheaper than the black ones — and hammered, screwed and notched them together into floorboards, walls and supporting columns.
Then, Chen, who had long had an amateur interest in architecture, wondered what it would be like to add a fourth floor. His brother and parents thought there was no need, so Chen did it alone.
Then, he wondered about a fifth. And a sixth.
“I just suddenly wanted to challenge myself,” he said. “And every time I completed my own small task or dream, it felt meaningful.”
He was also fuelled by resentment towards the Government, which kept serving him with demolition orders and sending officials to pressure his family.
By that point, their house was virtually the only one left in the vicinity; his neighbours had all moved into the new apartment buildings about 5km away. (Local officials have maintained to Chinese media that the building is illegal.)
Mass expropriations of land, at times by force, have been a widespread phenomenon in China for decades amid the country’s modernisation push.
The homes of those who do manage to hold out are sometimes called “nail houses”, for how they protrude like nails after the area around them has been cleared.
Still, few stick out quite like Chen’s.
A former mathematics major who dropped out of university because he felt that higher education was pointless, Chen spent years bouncing between cities, working as a calligraphy salesperson, insurance agent, and courier.
But he yearned for a more pastoral lifestyle, he said. When he returned to the village in 2018 to help his parents fend off the developers, he decided to stay.
“I don’t want my home to become a city. I feel like a guardian of the village,” he said, over noodles with homegrown vegetables that his mother had stir-fried on their traditional brick stove.
In recent years, the threat of demolition has become less immediate. Chen filed a lawsuit against the local government and the developers, which is still pending.
In any case, the proposed resort project stalled after the local government ran out of money. (Guizhou, one of China’s poorest and most indebted provinces, is littered with extravagant, unfinished tourism projects.)
But Chen has continued building. The house is now a constantly evolving display of his interests and hobbies.
On the first floor, Chen hung calligraphy from artists he befriended in Hangzhou.
On the fifth, he keeps a pile of faded books, mostly about history, philosophy and psychology.
The sixth floor has potted plants and a plank of wood suspended from the ceiling with ropes, like a swing, to hold a mortar and pestle and a teakettle.
On the eighth, a gift from an art student who once visited him: a lamp, with the shade made of tiny photographs of his house from different angles.
With each floor that he added, he moved his bedroom up, too: “That’s what makes it fun”. His parents and brother sleep on the ground floor and rarely make the vertiginous ascent.
Each morning, he inspects the house from top to bottom. To reinforce the fourth and fifth floors, he hauled wooden columns up through the windows with pulleys.
He added the buckets of water throughout the house after a storm blew out a fifth-floor wall. Eventually, he tore down most of the walls on the lower floors, so that wind could pass straight through the structure.
“There’s a law of increasing entropy,” Chen said. “This house, if I didn’t care for it, would naturally collapse in two years at most.”
He added: “But as long as I’m still standing, it will be too”.
Maintenance costs more time than money, he said. He estimated that he had spent a little more than US$20,000 ($33,500) on building materials. He has also spent about US$4000 on lawyers.
His family has been, if not enthusiastic about, at least resigned to Chen’s whims.
His parents are accustomed to curious visitors, at least a few every weekend. His brother came up with the idea of illuminating the house at night with lanterns.
They have all united against their fellow villagers, who they say accuse them of being nuisances, or greedy.
“Now we just don’t go over there,” said Tianliang, Chen’s brother. “There’s no need to listen to what they say about us.”
In town, some residents said exactly what the Chens predicted they would: that the house would collapse any day; that they were troublemakers. (The local government erected a sign near the house warning of safety hazards.)
But others expressed admiration for Chen’s creativity.
Zhu Zhiyuan, an employee at a local supermarket, said he had been drawn in when passing by on his scooter and had ventured closer for a better look. Still, he had not dared get too close.
“There are people who say it’s illegal,” he said.
Then he added: “But if they tore it down, that would be a bit of a shame”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vivian Wang
Photographs by: Andrea Verdelli
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