The force driving its destruction was simply too powerful
Chen Tianming's pyramid-shaped home, compared to Studio Ghibli's fantastical worlds, was demolished in hours despite years of tourist appeal and cultural significance. The destruction follows a broader 2018 village demolition for resort development, with Chen's defiant expansion of his home triggering official action and permit violations.
- Chen Tianming spent 200,000 yuan ($29,000) over eight years building the structure
- The 10-storey home was demolished in hours on May 18, 2026, in Xingyi village, Guizhou province
- Chen was detained and his phone confiscated during the demolition
- The broader village was demolished in 2018 for a planned resort that never materialized
Chinese authorities demolished a 10-storey ramshackle home in Guizhou province that had become a tourist attraction, citing missing building permits and safety concerns. The owner spent eight years and $29,000 building the whimsical structure and now seeks legal recourse.
Chen Tianming watched as the structure he had spent eight years building came down in hours. The 43-year-old had invested roughly 200,000 yuan—about $29,000—transforming his family's modest stone bungalow in the village of Xingyi, in Guizhou province, into something that defied easy categorization: a ten-storey pyramid of plywood rooms stacked haphazardly atop one another, held together by bamboo scaffolding, and somehow beloved by tourists who saw in it echoes of the fantastical worlds imagined by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.
The home had become an unlikely attraction in a region famous for its dramatic mountain landscapes. Visitors came to photograph it, to walk through its cramped corridors and tilted rooms, to marvel at the audacity of its construction. But to local authorities in Guizhou province, it represented something else entirely: an illegal structure, a safety hazard, a defiance of building codes and permit requirements that could not be tolerated.
The conflict had roots in a larger upheaval. In 2018, most of Xingyi village was demolished to make way for a planned tourist resort. Chen's family refused to leave. As the resort project stalled and faltered, Chen began building upward, adding storey after storey to his home—a physical act of resistance against the threat of demolition that hung over him. For years, authorities warned him to stop. In August 2024, they formally declared his home an illegal construction and ordered him to remove everything except the original single-storey bungalow. He did not comply.
On May 18th, Xingyi officials issued a final notice. Chen and his family had until 9 a.m. on Wednesday to vacate. When the deadline passed, law enforcement and public security officials arrived. They escorted Chen and his elderly parents away from the property. They confiscated his phone. They held him in custody while the structure was reduced to rubble—piles of building materials scattered across the ground where the tower had stood.
When Chen was finally released and able to document what remained, he spoke to the AFP news agency with a clarity that suggested he had already moved beyond shock into calculation. "I don't feel regret, because regret is useless," he said. "I also don't blame myself for failing to protect it—it's just that the force driving its destruction was simply too powerful." He had already begun seeking legal counsel. His strategy was to challenge the forced demolition itself, to have it designated illegal. If he succeeded, he believed he would have grounds to rebuild.
The case sits at the intersection of several tensions in contemporary China: the state's power to reshape landscapes and communities in the name of development, the individual's limited recourse when that power is exercised, and the question of what happens to acts of cultural or personal defiance when they collide with official will. Chen's home was not a monument or a protected site. It was a private structure built without permits on private land. Yet it had accumulated meaning—as a tourist attraction, as a symbol of resistance, as a work of folk creativity. All of that came down in a matter of hours. Whether Chen's legal challenge will succeed remains uncertain, but his determination to restore what was taken suggests the conflict is not yet finished.
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I don't feel regret, because regret is useless. The force driving its destruction was simply too powerful.— Chen Tianming, to AFP
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why did Chen keep building upward, year after year, when authorities were clearly telling him to stop?
Because the village was being erased around him. When they demolished most of Xingyi in 2018 for a resort that never materialized, Chen's refusal to leave became an act of defiance. Building higher was a way of saying: I'm still here, and I'm not going quietly.
But he must have known the structure itself—without permits, held together by bamboo—was genuinely precarious?
Almost certainly. The authorities weren't wrong about the safety risks. But Chen seemed to understand that the real danger wasn't the building itself. It was the power to erase it. He was racing against demolition, not against physics.
The tourists who came—did they understand what they were looking at?
They saw something beautiful and strange, something that reminded them of Miyazaki's worlds. They probably didn't know the full story. But their presence, their photographs, their visits—that gave the structure a kind of cultural weight it might not have had otherwise.
When they took his phone while demolishing the home, what was that about?
Control. Preventing documentation. Making sure there was no record of the moment itself, no images that could be circulated or used as evidence. It's a detail that reveals how the authorities understood the stakes.
Do you think his legal challenge has any chance?
It's difficult to say. He's arguing the demolition itself was illegal, not that he should have been allowed to keep an unpermitted structure. That's a narrower argument, but it's the one that might actually work.