Gold Leaf | Xiao Family Ancient Residence — Five Halls Deep Into Family Politics

The senior branch of the Zhang clan lives here, and they will not let Ji-sang forget what he is. Adopted into the third branch, married into standing he was not born to, he walks into this compound as a man who has to ask. Gold Leaf uses the house of the great-granduncle for the scenes where the antagonist is not the market — it is the family.

The building earns that. It is the only surviving five-hall Hakka enclosed compound in Taiwan: fifty-one rooms over four thousand square metres, begun in the Xianfeng era and copied from the family's ancestral house in Meixian, Guangdong. Each hall you pass through stands taller than the last while its courtyard shrinks. So the deeper you walk, the darker and tighter and more private it gets. By the fifth hall the light is thin and the colour has drained to red and black. That is not atmosphere added in post. That is the plan.

Look closely at the render. The aggregate in it is ground shell sand and rose stone, washed back with water so the grains stay proud; the walls and columns of the Qinye Hall carry shell sand and coral. Then look low, beside the doorways, for the cat holes cut through the masonry. There is a door curtain that is opaque from the street and transparent from inside — the women of the house used it to inspect the men proposed as husbands.

Fifty NT dollars, Tuesday to Sunday, closed for lunch. Guided tours are mostly weekends.

Walk to the study tower at the back and find the bullet holes from 1895, left in the wall from the fight against the Japanese advance. Ji-sang's problem in this house was that he was never quite family. The people who built it were defending something they thought was worth dying at the gate for.

Location data: Pingtung County tourism and Ministry of Culture heritage registry. National third-grade historic monument.