Life in Guangdong’s ancient, neglected, and crumbling “Earth Buildings”
On a sunny afternoon, 83-year-old Huang Jichang takes out a worn slip of paper from his room, points to a paragraph and, without removing the cheap cigarette he’s smoking from his mouth, reads it to me: “Xinyunlou was built in the year of Jiachen, in the period of Emperor Yongzheng, Qing dynasty.”