"This isn't China," you might well say, should someone lead you off a plane in a blindfold, then remove it after bringing you to Chikan. "A Mediterranean town gone to seed, perhaps." Then you'd sniff the humidity, note a svelte Asian chap rocket by on a scooter. "Vietnam? These buildings could be French colonial." But Chikan is two hours and a world away from Guangzhou, leading to the next question, "Who on earth built this place?"

They were Chinese expats, who left because China had nothing for them. Those were days of Qing decline, and Guangdong had never been a land of plenty. They scrabbled fortunes abroad, in the Americas mostly, and came back at last to their families, sharing their wealth, and a new taste in architecture not to be found elsewhere in their homeland.

Slow and lazy drift the days in Chikan, wafted along by the sultry air, and feng shui seeping over islets and channels, through the winding alleys inevitable in a Chinese river town, though this one's western stamp makes it unlike any other, a place Graham Greene would have felt at home in.

Colonnades, domed roofs, battlements, elements of the garrison in its architecture. Why so close and imposing? Those Chinese adventurers came back to a land still in chaos. With central authority all but a rumor, opium addicts rife, and gambling the chief industry, rich returnees had good reason to build close to the vest. Chinese caution informed proportion and line, western grandeur the rest.

As can be imagined, the wealth secured abroad was scattered in the warlord days, banished by decree of the new republic. The children of the builders followed their fathers' routes overseas, or hunkered down to lives of faded glory, their legacy somehow escaping utter destruction in the face of social realism. Their children, in turn, were lured away to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, cities incorporating the West to economic effect, not architectural.

Yet many of them now realize what they left behind, and dream of coming back to retire. The reminder of fortunes won and lost, the ghosts of faded splendor, keep coastal city bustle a million miles away.

Not that Chikan is lifeless. On Sundays, farmers from surrounding villages make a market in Chikan, shaded by the colonial row houses.

Then there's Qilou, "Riding Building", a promenade of almost six hundred buildings stretching some three kilometers. Each building has its own roof, but one can walk the entire way along a loggia, sheltered from both merciless Guangdong sun and monsoon rain, but still exposed to the view. Family stores of all description line the way. At dusk, this is the locus of night life, neighbors coming out for street food, tea, and idle chatter.

Chikan sits in Kaiping County, from where so many left to make their fortunes. Of course, many were not from Chikan but one of the scores of small villages surrounding it. The problems faced by the sons of Chikan were compounded out in these remote, defenseless settlements. Desperate bandits targeted the rich home-comers. In response, these earliest hai gui built watch towers.

Actually, these diaolou had begun to sprout up as early as the late Ming. Distinguishing between those built in the times before and after the returnees, the full Chinese and half-western, can occupy a full week's worth of treading sunny farm roads, watching the lush fields and tree screens for telltale masonry poking out above. Of 3,000 original towers, almost 1900 still stand, almost all within a few hours' walk of each other.

Some still live who can tell of times when the towers were needed for defense. Wu Dongjiu still remembers how her husband Situ Yao, and six other men of the Situ clan, defended their tower against advancing Japanese, in the summer of 1945. Outmanned and outgunned, the Situ fought on through seven days and nights, before capture, trial in the Situ family library, and summary execution, hung from the banyan trees in the shadow of the South Tower.

"We have to help young people understand the chaos of war," Wu Dongjiu tells visitors to the Situ library, which houses collections of early 20^th century magazines and newspapers, "to understand how hard it's been just to reach today. This good life came from those hard times."

Most of the diaolous went up in the 1920s and 30s, a riot of imitation European turrets and cupolas laid out with Chinese flair. Some were communal buildings, housing several families, others were fortified palaces for one rich master and his kin. Others were simply watch towers, invaluable in a land and time when trouble lurked as close as the smell of the manured fields.

The diaolou, now UNESCO protected, watch over country that still supports its people, rather than factories. Those people are as unaffected as the land they work, and don't mind showing their delight at the sight of a foreigner. They'll lead you, or at least point the way, to Yinglong Lou, the oldest surviving diaolou.

Or Nanxing Xielou, the leaning tower of Nanxing, which has been giving in to gravity two centimeters per year since 1902, and could topple should an extra-large tourist decide to rest on the wrong side of the upper deck.