Historic houses on Kinmen island, Taiwan restored as guest houses and inns – now all they need are some customers
- The county government of Kinmen, near the Chinese mainland, has subsidised the restoration of old houses, and 117 have been turned into visitor accommodation
- There are three main types: Qing dynasty courtyard homes, Western-style houses and coastal houses fortified to keep out pirates
Sam Yang’s courtyard house has, as far as he’s aware, belonged to his family of fishermen and sorghum farmers since it was built during the late Qing dynasty.
The 214 square metre (2,300 sq ft) property is on Kinmen, or Quemoy, the island that gives its name to a small Taiwanese island chain lying a few kilometres off the coast of mainland China’s Fujian province and to the county they comprise.
In 2015, Yang learned that the county government was giving subsidies to homeowners who wished to restore their properties to the style in which they were built – mostly a style that was common in Fujian before 1900. In March 2021, after six years of work, he opened his property as a guest house, the Hu Feng Ancient Stay.
Yang is not the only home retrofitter in Kinmen. Some 117 houses – hollow bricks covered with coloured ceramic squares, spiky roofs made from carved tiles, stone lion doorway decorations and all – have been restored and opened as inns or guest houses.
Architecture is at the core of Kinmen’s attraction for tourists, along with coastal bunkers, the 1949 battleground of Kuningtou and other reminders of the Nationalist-Communist skirmishes of the 1950s to 1970s, says deputy county magistrate Hwang Yi-kai.
“There’s a little bit of a foreign country feeling. Kinmen has a different style from Taiwan, including traditional architecture, but it’s not always complete,” says Hwang, explaining why subsidies for restoration have been offered since 1995.