A man built a house that looks like Harry Potter's Lair to escape Chinese authorities

In the pages of the New York Times recently appeared some incredible photos. They depict a Chinese man in his 40s with his feet on reddish ground, surrounded by a forest of grass and pomegranate trees. Behind him are two buildings. To his right is a group of buildings easily recognizable as typical Chinese folk housing, while on the other side is an irredeemably different building -- a dark red wooden house reminiscent of "the Weasleys' Den" in Harry Potter, the rickety building in the English countryside that repeatedly serves as a safe haven for young wizards in Rowling's stories.  


This house that the New Yorker newspaper exclusively chronicled is by Chen Tianming, who is the designer, builder and resident of this small area of the world assembled over seven years. After all, Chen is an ordinary resident of rural China who happened upon something relatively common in the Chinese real estate market and beyond. After all, that is exactly how the tale of the famous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy begins. Chen Tianming, however, has responded exceptionally well.

In 2018, authorities in Xingyi prefecture in China's Guizhou province proposed that Chen s family and other rural villagers leave their homes. The area was to be demolished to make way for a large tourism project, which included a resort, an artificial lake and a theater. Chen's family-two farmers who had built their house in the 1980s and lived there with their two children-oppose the expropriation. All of the neighbors, however, accept the offer, convinced by ever-increasing financial compensation and the promise of new apartments. 

At first, Chen and his brother also try to negotiate: they add a third floor to the small family home in an attempt to increase the square footage and thus the compensation. But soon, for Chen, the issue stops being just economic. It becomes a personal challenge, a form of resistance against what he sees as forced dispossession. So, in the following years, he continues to expand the house: adding a fifth floor in 2019, a sixth in 2022, a seventh in 2023. He ends up building a vertical labyrinth, straight out of a dream  of Studio Ghibli, while the resort project grinds to a halt. 

Today, this house, where the lanterns look like fireflies, stands on eleven levels that get narrower and narrower as you climb between light poles and red boards and house everything from gifts from art students fascinated by the structure to books on calligraphy, philosophy and architecture. So many are the tourists who stop their cars among the hills of Guizhou being careful not to topple over the complex system of water buckets that supports this jewel of dyi architecture. And there are many others who consider the story of Chen's family a case study in the landscape of forced expropriations in hyper-modernized China.  In the meantime, as from the eighth floor of this absurd vertical house he watches his neighbors move through the gray corridors of the new apartments where, in 2018, they were relocated, Chen boasts to the New York Times, "Other people spend millions, and no one goes to look at their houses."