I don't know if I'm officially within the borders of Kaiping when I see my first diaolou. As these things go, particularly if you are comparing it to the diaolou that got "Kaiping's Defensive Towers" listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it's pretty pathetic. There's a two storey warehouse nearby that's actually taller than it.

However, the scrappy poor diaolou that barely make the grade as diaolou are still diaolou. In point of fact, the ones like this that don't have any fancy Italianate wreathes of flowers or round balconies, that weren't getting used as manor houses when bandits were roaming the countryside, they're actually a really important part of diaolou culture on account of being one of the inspirations behind taking the modern technology of imported concrete and building massive hulking fortified towers that—pardon my pun—towered over the countryside.

There's a pair of diaolou on the Leizhou Peninsula that are similarly as unadorned, uninteresting, and as unable as this first diaolou to do more than provide a hasty shelter for whoever ran there in time¹ which are also the only diaolou I've ever come across where there's bullet scars in the concrete.

Because, for all that diaolou of all shapes and sizes are very clearly defensive structures built in response to the fear of marauding bands of not very nice people wandering the countryside, your average Not Very Nice Person is going to take one look at the metal shutters on the barred windows of the first 20 feet, and the sniper holes, and go "maybe I should go bother someone else". 

Which is why, although they eventually peter out, just about every village in this region has at least one diaolou either as a community structure (such as a gatehouse) or as a rich family's home. With rebarred concrete allowing for much taller structures than before, and this part of Guangdong not being known for cool summers, I suspect that the enormous ones which look to be capable of housing a few dozen people might have even been built so tall as a way to capture errant breezes in an era before air conditioning.

Once the first diaolou is spotted, although I'll do a stretch of kind of main road where I see none, it quickly gets to the point where—instead of going "oh my god, it's open and I can go inside!"—I'm like "yeah whatever" and only turning down side roads to check them out if they've got something special or unique going on.

The road which I enter town on is almost certainly the main road which I left Guangzhou on during the 2014 jaunt that convinced me I never again want to leave a major city by bike². I know this not because I found matching sites for photos and not because I tried to find the 80s hotel that I stayed in in Shuikou but because it was exactly as I remembered with a jersey barrier down the middle of a divided highway packed with stop and go traffic in both directions.

I probably should have tried to find 2013's hotel³. Just because. I don't remember anything particularly special about it other than it's age and it's obviously having been a post Reform and Opening Up hotel for Hong Kong investors and family members from overseas. However, accessing the saved journals that were once on CGOAB is a pain in the butt and I wasn't up for hunting through Google Photos one month at a time to see if anything I had was good for making matches.

Instead I ended up at the Paramount. Chosen on account of being one of the places that didn't specifically list themselves as foreigner unfriendly, I was less than thrilled to discover it would be my third day in a row carrying my bike upstairs. I was also very unhappy to see the ginormous KTV sign over the stairwell and had my fingers crossed that any place with a sign as rundown looking as that one had either gone out of business because of Covid or was actually a front for prostitution and therefore wouldn't be too loud.

The KTV had, in fact, gone out of business. The hotel was on the premises of the former KTV. In addition to random marks left behind from prying out the sofas, my room still had a Coors Light poster on the wall from when it was still a KTV.

Back outside for dinner, prior to my curiosity forcing me to ask the hotel owner and find out that it was already 10 years old as hotel, I took a closer look at the sign and realized it was neon tube instead of LEDs. During it's heyday, like the 1920s Shanghai ballroom it was named after, it might have just been one of the fanciest things in town.

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¹ They aren't placed in such a way as to indicate having been part of a gatehouse in a village wall

² In the many times I've done it since, it's never been quite as horrible as all that but it's never really been nice

³ It's a good thing I didn't try as it seems I spent the night 15km further south in the town of 大江