The structure teeters over fields of knee-high grass, looking like a cross between a camping tent and a giant wedding cake. Eleven stories of dark red wooden rooms, diminishing in size as they ascend, balance atop one another, seemingly held together by only the thicket of cords that stretches from the peak to the ground.

这座建筑矗立在及膝高的草丛中，岌岌可危，外观像是露营帐篷和巨型婚礼蛋糕的混合体。十一层暗红色的木质房间层层向上堆叠，保持着平衡，越往上越小，看上去完全靠从顶端延伸到地面的缕缕绳索维系。

Inside feels no less precarious. The ceilings are propped up with repurposed utility poles. Power strips and wires dangle from low-hanging beams. Giant buckets of rainwater help support the weight of the structure. The homemade ladders that connect the floors perch at steep angles, often without handrails at the side.

建筑内部似乎同样让人提心吊胆。天花板由回收的电线杆支撑，插线板和电线从低垂的横梁上垂下，装着雨水的大桶用来辅助承重。连接各楼层的自制梯子非常陡，且往往没有扶手。

Chen Tianming — the tower’s 43-year-old designer, builder and resident — does not need them anyway. He climbed lightly up the ladders, past the fifth-floor reading nook and the sixth-floor open-air tearoom.

反正43岁的陈天明——这座塔屋的设计者、建造者和居住者——也不需要扶手，他轻松地爬上梯子，经过五楼的阅读区和六楼的露天茶室。

From the ninth floor, he surveyed the sturdy, standardized apartment buildings in the distance where his neighbors live.

在九楼，他眺望远处邻居们居住的坚固的标准化公寓楼。

陈天明在他家附近，身后是新建的公寓楼。

“They say the house is shabby, that it could be blown down by wind at any time,” he said — an observation that did not seem altogether far-fetched when I visited him last month.

“他们说烂房子，什么随时一阵大风吹倒，”他说——上个月登门拜访的我觉得这话听上去并非全无道理。

“But the advantage is that it’s conspicuous, a bit eye-catching. People admire it,” he added. “Other people spend millions, and no one goes to look at their houses.”

“但是建这个的优点就是显眼包有点出风头，反而让很多人来欣赏，”他补充道，“他们花个100来万的人都没有人去看。”

Mr. Chen’s house is so unusual that it has lured gawkers and even tourists to his rural corner of Guizhou Province, in southwestern China. It evokes a Dr. Seuss drawing, or the Burrow in “Harry Potter.” Many people on Chinese social media have compared it to Howl’s Moving Castle.”

陈天明的房子太过特别，以至于吸引了好奇的人，甚至是游客，来到中国西南部贵州省的这个乡村角落。它让人想起苏斯博士的插画，或是《哈利·波特》里的“陋居”。许多中国网友将其比作“哈尔的移动城堡”。

To the casual observer, the house may be a mere spectacle, a Frankensteinian oddity.

乍一看，这所房子或许只是一个景观、一个拼凑起来的怪胎。

陈天明指着远处的高楼。

To Mr. Chen, it is a monument to his determination to live where — and how — he wants, in defiance of the local government, gossiping neighbors and seemingly even common sense.

但对陈天明而言，它是一座纪念碑，彰显着他的决心——就算违抗当地政府和说闲话的邻居，甚至看上去有违常理，也要坚持在自己想住的地方、按自己想要的方式生活。

He began modifying his family home in 2018, when the authorities in the city of Xingyi ordered his village demolished to make way for a resort they planned to build. Mr. Chen’s parents, farmers who had built the house in the 1980s, thought that the money that officials were offering as compensation for the move was too low and refused to leave.

2018年，他开始改造自家房屋。当时兴义市有关部门下令他所在的村庄拆迁，为计划修建的度假村腾出空间。陈天明的父母是农民，这所房子是他们在20世纪80年代建造的，他们认为官方提出的搬迁补偿款太低，拒绝搬走。

When bulldozers began razing their pomegranate trees anyway, Mr. Chen rushed home from Hangzhou, the eastern city where he had been working as a package courier.

当推土机开始铲平他们的石榴树时，正在东部城市杭州做快递员的陈天明赶回了家。

Along with his brother, Chen Tianliang, he started adding a third floor. At first, the motivation was in part practical: Compensation payment was determined by square footage, and if the house had more floors, they would be entitled to more money.

他和弟弟陈天亮开始加盖三楼。起初的动机部分是出于实际的考虑：补偿款是按面积计算的，房子楼层越多，他们能拿到的钱就越多。

They visited a secondhand building materials market and bought old utility poles and red composite boards — cheaper than the black ones — and hammered, screwed and notched them together into floorboards, walls and supporting columns.

他们去二手建材市场，买回旧电线杆和红色复合板（比黑色的便宜），通过敲钉、螺丝、开槽等方式，将这些材料组装成楼板、墙壁和支撑柱。

去看陈天明房子的人。在中国的社交媒体上，许多人将这所房子与“哈尔的移动城堡”相提并论。

Then, Mr. Chen, who had long had an amateur interest in architecture, wondered what it would be like to add a fourth floor. His brother and parents thought there was no need, so Mr. Chen did it alone. Then, he wondered about a fifth. And a sixth.

陈天明的业余爱好一直是建筑，之后他想，加个四楼会怎么样呢？弟弟和父母觉得没必要，于是陈天明就自己动手。接着，他又想加五楼、六楼。

“I just suddenly wanted to challenge myself,” he said. “And every time I completed my own small task or dream, it felt meaningful.”

“突然就挑战一下自己，”他说，“然后自己一个小目标小梦想自己给它实现了还是有意义的。”

He was also fueled by resentment toward the government, which kept serving him with demolition orders and sending officials to pressure his family. By that point, their house was virtually the only one left in the vicinity; his neighbors had all moved into the new apartment buildings about three miles away. (Local officials have maintained to Chinese media that the building is illegal.)

此外，对政府的不满也助长了他的行为——政府不断向他下达拆迁令，派官员向他家施压。那时，他们家几乎是附近仅存的房屋了，邻居们都已搬到约五公里外的新公寓楼里。（当地官员向中国媒体坚称这栋建筑是违法的。）

Mass expropriations of land, at times by force, have been a widespread phenomenon in China for decades amid the country’s modernization push. The homes of those who do manage to hold out are sometimes called “nail houses,” for how they protrude like nails after the area around them has been cleared.

几十年来，在中国推进现代化的过程中，大规模征用土地（有时甚至是暴力征用）是一个普遍现象。那些想方设法不搬走的房屋有时被称为“钉子户”，因为在周围地区被清理后，它们就像钉子一样突出。

陈天明的邻居在拆迁后被安置在居民区，图为居民区内的菜市场。

Still, few stick out quite like Mr. Chen’s.

即便如此，也很少有房子能像陈天明的房子这样扎眼。

A former mathematics major who dropped out of university because he felt that higher education was pointless, Mr. Chen spent years bouncing between cities, working as a calligraphy salesman, insurance agent and courier. But he yearned for a more pastoral lifestyle, he said. When he returned to the village in 2018 to help his parents fend off the developers, he decided to stay.

陈天明的大学专业是数学，因觉得高等教育毫无意义而辍学。多年来，他在不同城市辗转，做过书法推销员、保险经纪和快递员。但他说，自己渴望更田园式的生活。2018年，他回到村里帮父母抵制开发商，之后就决定留下来。

“I don’t want my home to become a city. I feel like a guardian of the village,” he said, over noodles with homegrown vegetables that his mother had stir-fried on their traditional brick stove.

“最根源的是我不希望我这里变成城市。我像一个守村人一样，乡村守护者那种感觉，”他一边吃着母亲用自家种的蔬菜在传统砖灶上炒的面条，一边说道。

陈天明的母亲在家里的客厅看电视。他的父母已经习惯了家里络绎不绝的好奇访客。

In recent years, the threat of demolition has become less immediate. Mr. Chen filed a lawsuit against the local government and the developers, which is still pending. In any case, the proposed resort project stalled after the local government ran out of money. (Guizhou, one of China’s poorest and most indebted provinces, is littered with extravagant, unfinished tourism projects.)

近年来，拆迁的威胁已不那么紧迫。陈天明起诉了当地政府和开发商，案件仍在审理中。无论如何，由于当地政府资金耗尽，拟议的度假村项目已陷入停滞。（贵州是中国最贫困、负债最重的省份之一，到处都是奢华却未完工的旅游项目。）

But Mr. Chen has continued building. The house is now a constantly evolving display of his interests and hobbies.

但陈天明仍在继续建造。这所房子如今成了他兴趣爱好的展示地，且一直在不断发展。

On the first floor, Mr. Chen hung calligraphy from artists he befriended in Hangzhou. On the fifth, he keeps a pile of faded books, mostly about history, philosophy and psychology. The sixth floor has potted plants and a plank of wood suspended from the ceiling with ropes, like a swing, to hold a mortar and pestle and a teakettle. On the eighth, a gift from an art student who once visited him: a lamp, with the shade made of tiny photographs of his house from different angles.

一楼挂着他在杭州结识的艺术家的书法作品。五楼堆着一摞褪色的书，大多是关于历史、哲学和心理学的。六楼有盆栽，还有一块木板，用绳子吊在天花板上，像个秋千，上面放着一个研钵、一个杵和一把茶壶。八楼有一盏灯，是来拜访他的一名艺术学生送的，灯罩由从不同角度拍摄的这栋房子的小照片组成。

With each floor that he added, he moved his bedroom up, too: “That’s what makes it fun.” (His parents and brother sleep on the ground floor and rarely make the vertiginous ascent.)

每加盖一层，他就把卧室也往上搬：“经常换住的地方，这才好玩。”（他的父母和弟弟睡在一楼，很少费力爬上那些让人眩晕的梯子。）

Each morning, he inspects the house from top to bottom. To reinforce the fourth and fifth floors, he hauled wooden columns up through the windows with pulleys. He added the buckets of water throughout the house after a storm blew out a fifth-floor wall. Eventually, he tore down most of the walls on the lower floors, so that wind could pass straight through the structure.

每天早上，他都会从上到下检查房子。为了加固四楼和五楼，他用滑轮把木柱从窗户吊上来。一场暴风雨吹坏了五楼的一面墙后，他在房子各处都放上了水桶。最后，他拆掉了楼下几层的大部分墙壁，这样风就能直接穿过建筑。

陈天明在他家的一个房间里休息。每增加一层楼，他就会把卧室往上移。

“There’s a law of increasing entropy,” Mr. Chen said. “This house, if I didn’t care for it, would naturally collapse in two years at most.” He added, “But as long as I’m still standing, it will be too.”

“就是有个熵增定律，”陈天明说，“这个房子，只要我不管，最多两年它就自然会垮就会倒塌，”他还说，“但是说如果我在维护，我不倒他不倒。”

Maintenance costs more time than money, he said. He estimated that he had spent a little more than $20,000 on building materials. He has also spent about $4,000 on lawyers.

他说，维护房子花的时间比金钱更多。他估计在建材上花了大约15万元，在律师费上花了约3万元。

His family has been, if not enthusiastic about, at least resigned to Mr. Chen’s whims. His parents are accustomed to curious visitors, at least a few every weekend. His brother came up with the idea of illuminating the house at night with lanterns. They have all united against their fellow villagers, who they say accuse them of being nuisances, or greedy.

家人对陈天明的突发奇想虽说谈不上多支持，至少还是选择了接受。他的父母已经习惯了好奇的访客——至少每个周末都会有几个。他的弟弟想出了晚上用灯笼照亮房子的主意。他们一家人团结起来，对抗那些指责他们扰民或者贪心的村民。

“Now we just don’t go over there,” said Tianliang, Mr. Chen’s brother. “There’s no need to listen to what they say about us.”

“现在我不走那边去就行了，”陈天明的弟弟陈天亮说，“不要去听他们说你。”

In town, some residents said exactly what the Chens predicted they would: that the house would collapse any day; that they were troublemakers. (The local government erected a sign near the house warning of safety hazards.)

镇上有些居民说的话，都是陈家能预料到的：这房子随时会塌；他们在惹事生非。（当地政府在房子附近立了一块警示牌，提醒存在安全隐患。）

But others expressed admiration for Mr. Chen’s creativity.

但也有人对陈天明的创造力表示钦佩。

Zhu Zhiyuan, an employee at a local supermarket, said he had been drawn in when passing by on his scooter and had ventured closer for a better look. Still, he had not dared get too close.

当地一家超市的员工朱志远（音）说，他骑电动车路过时被这房子吸引，还走近看了看，但没敢靠太近。

“There are people who say it’s illegal,” he said. Then he added, “But if they tore it down, that would be a bit of a shame.”

“有人就是说他是违章的，”他说，接着又补充道，“但是如果拆了的话，有点可惜。”

陈天明家附近的告示牌，警告路人该建筑存在安全隐患。