The combination of Chinese and Western architectural cultures is also embodied on the Lu-style building.

    On the upper part of the tower, there was outlier corridor for the insiders to occupy a commanding position to fire at those attackers. Generally, those watchtowers are located in the rear or on both sides of the village, occupying the commanding position. At least there were 2 or 3 towers in each village, and at most 7 or 8 ones. A lot of watchtowers are still remaining in Wuyi region, with Kaiping owns most of the existing ones. According to the incomplete statistics, there are more than 1 400 towers in Kaiping in the year of 2 000.

    The architectural style of watchtower originated rather early. In early Qing Dynasty, there already appeared such towers in villages round Kaiping. Up to the early 20'h century, with the inflow of the large sum of overseas capital, the financial conditions of many relatives of overseas Chinese were greatly improved, for example, in Taishan County only, the overseas remittance reached as high as US$10 million before 1929, after 1929, it rocketed to US$30 million. At the same time, the public order in these overseas villages was from bad to worse. Those rich families were regarded as the ¡°financial source ¡±in the eyes of local bandits. The bandits were on a rampage in the villages, robbing and blackmailing. The local people had no way out but to organize to build towers to safeguard themselves. Today, the defensive function of the towers disappeared, but the towers remain to be the witness of the past history, creating a unique historical atmosphere, producing kind of sense of alien beauty, making another contribution to the regional resident dwellings.

    The towers in Wuyi generally own 3 to 6 floors, a few of them 7 to 9 floors. Its plane basically takes the shape of square. The tower is divided into 3 parts: tower body, outlier floor and roof. The lower part is the body of the tower, which, for the purpose of defense, appears thick and strong with small windows and a lot of bullet holes. Limited by a series of military functions such as defense, the shape of tower body is very simple and distinctive, large piece of solid wall gives a strong sense of weight and closed system, but after all it was not the real tower for war, it was the place for local people to live in, hence it should also show to some degree the sense of beauty, their love of life, so that there appeared the delicate window frame above the windows. The upper part of the firm and strong body is the relative spacious part called outlier floor, where people could look out or launch counter-attack. Along the corridor there were bullet holes on the wall and the floor. Judged from the shape, the comers of some outlier floors appears tube-shaped, others octagon-shaped, like "swallow net", a lot more to be the pillar-shaped European style. In addition to the military implication, the outlier corridors, we can find, also give the architectural implication in terms of aesthetics and ecology. Aesthetically, these corridors and the closed wall match each other so well that they produce the contrast between vacancy and reality.

    Ecologically, the open corridors are of benefit to ventilating, to the improvement of people's living environment in southern Guangdong Province, where the climate usually is moist and dump. The most magnificent part of such building is the housetop, which was mostly sitting on the square or polygon bases, forming beautiful skylines.

    Judged from the building materials and styles, the watchtowers could be divided into three types: clay building, brick building and reinforced concrete building. Clay and brick were building materials of Chinese traditional resident dwellings, while the reinforced concrete was the material born under the influence of Western culture. These towers were mostly built in the 1920's or 30's of the last century. Those overseas owners, when absorbing the different building styles of different countries, built them with the then most advanced materials and technology. Those buildings fully displayed the merge and clash of cultures of East and West, ancient and contemporary. Which is specifically reflected in two aspects: one is that so many cultural factors, such as Chinese traditional style, ancient Greek and Romanesque styles, European Gothic style of Middle Ages and Islamic style, gathered in such small region: the other is that so many different architectural styles manifested in one building, forming a kind of "hors d'teuvres'" in a compromising way.

    In these overseas Chinese villages, another attractive resident dwelling is called "Lu". ¡°Lu¡± is the elegant name of the resident dwelling for those well-to-do overseas Chinese families, to some degree like modern times villa. "Lu" usually has 2 or 3 floors, located in the environmentally elegant places of the village. The outlook design and structure of the building appeared liberal and flexible, suitable for people to inhabit. The outlook of ¡°Lu¡± is very similar to that of the watchtower because of their building style and materials, but since ¡°Lu¡± was rather low in floors, with more windows, the defensive function of the wall was naturally reduced, while life atmosphere increased. In addition, the traditional outlier corridor of towers was gradually changed into the concave spatial corridor, with a more reasonable spacious effect and ratio.