A configuration of space in southeast China and a configuration of space drafted in England, two centuries apart.
The building stands in the mountain country of southwestern Fujian, in the upper drainages of the Min and the Ting. It is round. It is three or four stories high. Its outer wall is rammed earth, three meters thick at the base, tapering to about a meter and a half at the eaves. The earth is mixed with lime, sand, sticky rice paste, and brown sugar, the rice and sugar acting as organic binders that increase the wall's tensile strength and weather resistance over centuries. Bamboo strips are laid horizontally inside the wall as it rises, working as reinforcement. The wall is the ground the building stands on, lifted up and shaped — the rice in the wall comes from the fields the building looks out over.
The wall has one door.
The door is set in a stone frame in the south side of the ring. It is timber, planked and pegged, often plated on the outside with iron sheets. Some tulou have water channels cut into the wood of the door so that fire set against it from outside can be defeated by water poured down the channels from above. The door opens into a passage cut through the thickness of the wall — three meters of rammed earth between outside and inside — and the passage has a second door at the inner end. To enter the building is to pass through a short tunnel of earth.
Inside the wall, the building turns around a courtyard. The lower floor is given to kitchens, to storage, to animals, to the well that serves the whole community. The grain stores sit above the kitchens. The sleeping rooms are higher. Each family in the lineage holds a vertical stack — two or three rooms on each floor, opening onto a ring corridor that runs the full circumference of the building. A family's rooms are stacked like a slice of cake; the corridor connects all the slices. There are no interior partitions between families on the ground floor courtyard side, only between the stacks themselves. The well is shared. The kitchen smoke is shared. The cry of a child on the second floor is heard around the ring.
At the center of the courtyard, on the ground floor, stands the ancestral hall. The zǔtáng. It is a small building or a defined space within a small building, with a raised altar against its back wall. The altar holds the spirit tablets of the lineage's ancestors — names, dates, generation markers, going back as far as the lineage's records go. Incense is offered there at the new and full moons, at the Qingming sweep in the third month, at the winter solstice, at New Year, at every wedding and every funeral the lineage performs. The hall is where the descent group becomes visible to itself. The genealogy is kept there or near there. The senior males of the lineage gather there to make decisions. When a child is born into the lineage, the child is presented there. When a member dies, the body lies there before burial.
The vertical organization of the building is also a cosmological organization. Below: earth, animals, grain, the substance of life. In the middle: families, sleeping, eating, raising children. Above the middle: the upper floors where the lineage's continuity in time is held, the older generations on the higher levels in many tulou, closest to the roof and the sky. At the symbolic center of the whole arrangement: the ancestors, raised on the altar, addressed across the courtyard from every door of every family's rooms.
The outer wall faces a specific outside. The mountain country of southwestern Fujian was, for the centuries during which most surviving tulou were built, a contested landscape. The Hakka who built many of these buildings were later arrivals — kèjiā, "guest people" — settling among the She and among earlier Han communities, holding land in mountain valleys that other groups also wanted. The Minnan who built others of these buildings were dealing with their own pressures: clan feuds, bandit raids, the slow violence of crowded mountain agriculture. The wall faces this outside. The single door faces it. The windowless lower floors face it. The arrow slits under the eaves face it. Inside, the families face each other across the courtyard.
The lineage organizes time. The agricultural year, the ritual calendar, the generational reckoning of births and deaths and marriages. Days are kitchen and field; weeks are markets in the valley town; months are the moon's offerings at the altar; years are the great festivals; generations are the names added to the tablets. The time of the building is the time of the lineage. A person born into the building enters that time and is shaped by it, and when they die they enter the altar at its center.
The lineage is patrilineal. Property is held by the lineage trust. Marriages bring women into the building from other lineages and send the building's daughters out to other buildings. The senior males speak in the ancestors' names. The genealogy is the record of who counts and how.
The door, again. The door is operated by the lineage. It opens for trade, for marriage processions, for the field labor that goes out at dawn and returns at dusk, for the funeral procession going to the burial ground, for the bride coming in. It closes at night. It closes when a threat is reported. It closes during festivals to make the building's interior its own world for the duration. The door is the operational hinge of the whole arrangement: every passage between the inside and the outside passes through it, and the lineage controls the door.
Forty-six tulou were inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage in 2008. Many more stand throughout the region, some inhabited still, some empty, some converted to museums or guesthouses, some collapsing slowly back into the ground they were lifted from. The oldest surviving examples are from the Ming. The tradition is older.
The building is drafted on paper in 1791 by Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher and reformer, then forty-three years old. He calls it the panopticon, from the Greek for "all-seeing." He intends it to be a prison. He pitches it to the British government as a prison. He spends the next twenty years and most of his personal fortune attempting to have one built, with himself as the contracted governor, profiting from the labor of the inmates. The British government eventually pays him compensation for the failure of the scheme but does not build the prison he designed.
The drawing, in plan view, is a circle.
The outer ring is a multistory cellblock. Each cell occupies a wedge of the ring, with its outer wall pierced by a window to admit light from the building's exterior, and its inner wall — facing the courtyard — open or barred so that the cell's interior is visible from the center. The cells are separated from each other by solid walls. A prisoner in one cell cannot see, hear, or communicate with the prisoner in the adjacent cell. Each cell holds one inmate.
At the center of the courtyard stands a tower.
The tower is the inspector's lodge. It is the operational center of the building. From inside the tower, an inspector can see into every cell of the ring. Bentham specifies the tower's design with particular care: venetian blinds on the tower's windows, internal partitions that break up the inspector's silhouette, a system of lamps placed behind the inspector at night so that the tower glows but the figure inside it does not. The prisoner in the cell can see the tower at all times. The prisoner cannot see whether the inspector is inside the tower at any given moment. The prisoner cannot see whether the inspector is looking at them specifically. The prisoner cannot verify, ever, that they are not being watched.
This asymmetry is the building's mechanism. Bentham writes about it with the clarity of an inventor describing a machine. The prisoner, unable to verify the absence of the gaze, must behave at all times as if the gaze were present. The behavior, repeated, becomes habit. The habit, internalized, becomes character. The prisoner, eventually, watches themselves on behalf of the inspector who may or may not be there. One inspector, in principle, can hold a thousand prisoners in this condition. The labor of surveillance is transferred from the watcher to the watched.
The cells are arranged so that the prisoner faces the tower. The prisoner does not face the other prisoners. The prisoner does not see the other prisoners. The radial walls between cells ensure that each inmate is alone with the tower. The community of the inmates is broken at the architectural level. There is no inmate ring corridor, no shared courtyard, no shared well. There is the cell, the tower, and the gaze.
The building has a door. One door, set in the outer wall, controlled by the staff. Prisoners enter through the door once and do not leave through it again until the term of their sentence is complete. Goods, food, staff, and inspectors pass through the door on a regulated schedule. The door is operated by the institution.
Time inside the building is the schedule. The bell, the count, the work shift, the meal, the exercise period, the lights-out. Bentham specifies the use of the prisoners' labor in detail — the panopticon is to be a manufacturing facility as well as a prison, the inmates' work let out to contractors, the profits accruing in part to the governor. Discipline is temporal as much as spatial. The day is divided. The week is divided. The sentence is divided. Each unit of time has its assigned activity, its assigned location, its assigned posture. The bell that begins each unit and ends it is heard throughout the ring.
The outer wall faces a specific outside. The English city of the late 18th century — London, Manchester, the new industrial towns — is a place Bentham and his contemporaries describe as disordered: a mass of unreformed poor, criminal in tendency, ungoverned in habit, requiring new institutions to make them tractable. The panopticon is one of these new institutions. The wall faces the city. The single door faces it. The high outer perimeter, the controlled entry, the absence of windows the prisoner can use to see out — all face the city the prisoners came from and to which, after their reformation, they are to be returned. The building is the disciplinary state with its back to the inmate and its face to the population the inmate represents.
The materials are industrial. Brick. Iron for the bars and the door. Glass for the tower's windows. Gas for the tower's lamp. The labor of construction is wage labor. The materials are bought on the market. The building does not come up out of the ground it stands on; it is assembled on the ground from materials produced elsewhere.
The inspector's tower, again. The inspector is a person — a paid functionary of the institution, in Bentham's scheme the contracted governor or his deputies. The inspector eats, sleeps, takes shifts, goes home at the end of the workday. The tower is empty for hours of every day. The mechanism does not require the tower to be occupied. The mechanism requires the prisoner to be unable to verify the tower's occupancy. The empty tower works as well as the staffed tower. Better, in some respects: it costs less.
Bentham's panopticon was not built in his lifetime to his specifications. Variants were built across the 19th and 20th centuries — Pentonville in London, Eastern State in Philadelphia, Stateville in Illinois, prisons in Cuba and the Netherlands and elsewhere. None reproduced the design exactly. All carried forward its principle: a central observation point, radial cellblocks, asymmetric visibility, the gaze as the engine of order. Michel Foucault took the design up in 1975 in Discipline and Punish and made it the diagram of a more general modern condition. Bentham drew a prison. Foucault read the prison as a sign.