The Kaiping Towers

I stumbled across the above images on a Korean website, at which many more can be seen — 중국식과 서양식 조화를 이룬 中 '개평 망루'. The reason that the "watchtowers incorporate architectural features from China and the West" is that Kaiping "has traditionally been a region of major emigration abroad, and a melting pot of ideas and trends brought back by overseas Chinese made good." The Kaiping Diaolou "were built during the early Qing Dynasty, reaching a peak in the 1920s and 1930s, when there were more than three thousand of these structures." "The towers built in the beginning of the 20th century were mainly paid from money of Chinese abroad in North America."