Tuanshan, the Yunnan village that tin money built and nobody left

Tin paid for this village. From the late Qing into the Republican years, men from Tuanshan (团山) walked the road north to the mines at Gejiu, came home with money, and spent it on houses: blue brick, carved lattice, courtyards laid out to the old rules. What is unusual is not that the houses are still standing. It is that the families never left them.

What the mines built

Tuanshan sits about thirteen kilometres west of Jianshui (建水) in southern Yunnan, and nearly everyone in it is surnamed Zhang (张). A dozen grand compounds spread along lanes barely wide enough for a motorbike, their names still painted above the gates — Huang'en Fu (皇恩府), the officer's house, the scholar's house. Slow down for the carving: window panels cut through in two layers, gilding worn thin, door-frame couplets that nobody has repainted into brightness.

Still a working address

Corn dries in the courtyards. Chillies hang from beams cut for a merchant's pride and now carrying a laundry line. You will step into a reception hall and find a television, a thermos, a grandmother who nods once and goes back to what she was doing. A few compounds are ticketed and roped; most are simply somebody's house with the gate left open, which is a courtesy rather than an invitation.

Nothing here was arranged for visitors, which is the reason to keep your voice down.

Getting there on the metre-gauge

The old French-built narrow line — mi gui (米轨), a metre between the rails — still carries a tourist train from Jianshui's Lin'an station out past Shuanglong Bridge to Tuanshan. It runs to a fixed timetable with only a few departures a day, and seats go early in spring and autumn. A taxi from the old town covers the same ground in about half an hour if the train is full.

团山村的房子不是修给游客看的，是有人一直住着的。