TEAR IT DOWN, THEY SAID. HE JUST KEPT BUILDING (2025)

DEFYING DEMOLITIONS ORDERS, A CHINESE MAN TURNED HIS HOME INTO A RICKETY 11-STORY TOWER.
NOW TOURISTS ARE COMING.

When, in 2018, authorities started to demolish most of Mr. Chen’s village on the outskirts of Xingyi, Guizhou Province, in order to make way for a real estate development project, he refused to leave the home his father had built in the 1980s. Instead, he started to build, layer after layer, floor after floor, what has now become an 11-storey tall tower.

Although the construction project has later been halted due to the worsening economic environment, Mr. Chen’s neighbors have already been resettled to the high-rises not far away. He stayed. He quit his job and now makes a living growing vegetables and raising farm animals alongside his parents and brother, and he is still going up — the highest floor was added just two months ago. Curious visitors have started to arrive and take a look at the tower that some have compared to the dreamlike work of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.

You might say the house is a symbol of Mr Chen’s stubbornness, but to me it’s a symbol of his freedom. In his own way, he is an artist, a rockstar, an anti-modern hero.

When he led me all the way up at dusk, surrounded by the colourful lights and lanterns that decorate the house, the space getting smaller floor after floor, and we reached his tiny bedroom on the 9th floor — a single mattress overlooking the beautiful fields of the countryside, his radio playing some instrumental music — I couldn’t help asking myself: “What does it mean, to stay true to yourself, in a world where conformity is the norm?”