Dexing Village

Dexing (德興里), also known as Xinjizhuang (新吉庄), is a rural farming settlement in Puzi laid out as a grid of red-brick sanheyuan (三合院) courtyard houses, all built facing south. The village was founded after floods on the Puzi River (朴子溪) destroyed the low-lying hamlet of Xiashuangxi in neighboring Liujiao (六腳); around 118 households relocated here in 1933 and rebuilt on a unified plan of three east-west lanes and four north-south lanes, each about 3.6 metres wide, a collective arrangement said to be without parallel elsewhere in Taiwan. The layout was planned by a geomancer, and the resettlement was led by the Hou (侯) family, still the dominant surname; the old Hou house at the settlement’s center, built in 1913, was dismantled at the original village and reassembled on the new site. Roughly a hundred of the courtyard houses survive largely unaltered, their chessboard pattern best appreciated from the air.