The Hakka are one of Taiwan's largest ethnic groups, descendants of migrants who moved from central China to Fujian and Guangdong provinces before crossing the Taiwan Strait, often under difficult circumstances, across several centuries. They brought with them the tulou tradition — buildings designed not just for shelter but for collective defense and communal living, where every family in the clan occupied a slice of the circle and no single household held a more prominent position than another. The Hakka Round House in Houlong translates this egalitarian geometry into a public institution. The building's circular floor plan creates a ground-level performance hall that faces inward, where visitors gather at the center. Ring-shaped trails wrap around the exterior. An arc-shaped observation deck offers views of the surrounding landscape. Water paths run through the grounds. The designers kept the form but changed the function: where the original tulou enclosed and defended, this building opens outward to welcome.

The Hakka Round House descends as much as it rises. Below ground level, a multimedia viewing room introduces visitors to Hakka history and culture through film and interactive displays — a deliberate choice to begin underground, in the foundation of things. The ground floor holds the round exhibition and performance hall, a flexible space used for concerts, theatrical presentations, and community events. The floor above houses gallery exhibitions on Hakka material culture, textiles, tools, and domestic life. At the very top, DIY classrooms give visitors hands-on access to Hakka crafts — weaving, dyeing, food preparation. The building spans 1,385 square meters of land and encloses a total floor area of 3,476 square meters. Its construction cost NT$130 million, funded by the Miaoli County Government, which opened the facility in October 2014. The county later faced financial pressures that led, in 2015, to plans to tender the building's operations to a private operator — a tension between cultural ambition and fiscal reality that many Taiwanese county-level institutions have navigated.

The material choice for the Round House is deliberately grounded: brick, not glass and steel. Brick echoes the earthen walls of the original tulou, though in a contemporary structural form rather than rammed earth. In Miaoli County, Hakka culture runs deep. The county is home to one of the highest concentrations of Hakka speakers in Taiwan, and the language — distinct from Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien — is still heard in markets, temples, and family kitchens throughout the region. The Round House serves as a gathering point for that identity: a place where the Hakka story can be told on its own terms, in its own architectural language, to visitors who may be encountering this community for the first time. The building's signature silhouette, visible from the surrounding farmland and foothills, has become a recognizable landmark in an area not usually known for architectural landmarks.

Houlong Township occupies the coast of northern Miaoli County, where the land is low and the sea close. The Round House is accessible from two rail connections: Miaoli Station on the Taiwan High Speed Rail for travelers arriving from Taipei or Taichung, and Fengfu Station on the Taiwan Railway for local and regional trains. The surrounding landscape shifts between flat agricultural land near the coast and the forested hills that press down from the east — the same terrain that shaped Hakka settlement patterns across Taiwan for generations. Visitors arriving from Fengfu Station pass through a patchwork of rice paddies and small orchards before the round form of the building appears above the low horizon. The effect is pleasingly surprising: a circle where you expect only a rectangle.