The Chinese rural landscape constitutes an extraordinary research experience into the profound meaning of forms in their universal relationship with Nature, which allows one to rediscover a profound and paradigmatic order beyond the specific architectural fact. The circular Chinese fortress-houses (Tulou), scattered along the river routes, between rice fields and wooden bridges, constitute the minimal unit of the village: a rural archipelago made up of “city-buildings” that host entire communities, in which the large courtyard assumes the role of “public space”, of “urban scene”. Ancestral earthen enclosures, monumental res of Nature, isolated and at the same time connected by the same landscape, refer to a universal history of forms. A concave and simultaneously convex form of “amphibious and terrestrial” origin, Tulou are endowed with a great formalising and structuring power. The enclosure becomes the system that measures the relationships between the parts making up the territorial geography, a form that becomes a sign, the expression of its content, meaning and signifier in the semiotics of the landscape.
