Welcome to Batou village, a small community deeply buried in Dongguan City in Guangdong Province in Southern China.
Faced with demolition, drowned and completely overlooked inside a buzzing city with well over 8 mill people, the villagers took drastic measures to renew their small community by turning it into a cultural mini-haven.
These few image albums will attempt to give an impression of why Batou is worth visiting and preserving.
Here you will find a small selection of Batou's buildings.
Most of the structures are still quite ordinary and typical for a Chinese city-village. Grey and red bricks are still the dominant material, however frequently with a concrete shell.
Many of the artistically and/or business inclined inhabitants are changing their buildings to lure in visitors.
On the front street is the central family shrine, an old, restored building offering the inhabitants an informal place to get together over tea and music.
The building actually belongs to the original family that settled many generations ago in Batou. Inside the building is a huge wall tablet inscribed with the names of all the family members, who settled here.
Traditional Chinese decorations adorn many parts of the structure.
The family shrine contains a huge amount of structural paintings, which depict traditional Chinese motives.
Images span a large spectrum from animals, nature, symbols to traditional landscape sceneries.
Painstaking efforts have been put into preserving and maintaining the decorations and they offer a great opportunity for visitors to study pictorial developments in China without having to go to a museum.
A small village is not just made up of buildings but rather of people, who stick together.
This galley is a collection of some of the people, who were out enjoying the beautiful day, when I visited.
Here are mothers with their offspring, bricklayers, anglers, children at play, grandmothers, workers and, of course, a few 'long nose' visitors such as myself.