Xia shan hu, tiger coming down the hill
Tighter than four-point gold: the door opens on the front, the hall begins as soon as you are inside, rooms flank a sky well, and an ordinary household could afford it.
Pronunciation xià shān hǔ｜Houses and settlement｜One entry in the Chaoshan glossary
What it means
A hall in front and rooms behind, symmetrical to either side, one sky well in the middle. The door is on the front elevation and opens straight into the hall, with a rear room partitioned off behind it. Smaller than four-point gold and cheaper to build, and far more numerous.
The usual explanation of the name is that the house is high at the front and low at the back, the side rooms like the forepaws of a tiger, taking the momentum of a tiger coming down. The story is widely told and has no direct record in early sources.
How to tell one
Where houses stand in long rows, it is usually this one. Read a village by asking where the ancestral hall is, how many four-point gold houses there are, and how the tiger houses are ranged, and you have the lineage structure and the distribution of means.
Words easily confused
What separates this from four-point gold is not the decoration but the number of ranges: four-point gold runs two deep, the tiger house one from front to back.
Read next: The tiger house: the door that opens into the hall.
Same group: four-point gold, the side rows, cheng, the paved yard.
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Last revised: 3 November 2026