For example, Hakka group houses can be regarded as closely related to "Wu Bi" (castle wall) popular during the period from the Eastern Han to the Wei and Jin dynasties.

The term "Wu" (fortified castle) originally referred to a small castle for stationing troops in a frontier fortress. Beginning from the middle part of the EasternHan Dynasty, due to the chaos caused by frequent wars in the central plains, which continued for several hundred years, rich and powerful people vied to build fortified castles for self-defense. For a while, the construction of castles was all the vogue, and those constructed at this time were called Hakka Group Houses. They are in a variety of forms, but mainly fall into two kinds -wu feng lou (five phoenix tower) and tu lou (earthen tower), in addition to wei long Wu (adragon-encircled house). The common characteristics are large size, compact encirclement and a centripetal and symmetrical layout, housing a dozen to several dozen families of the same clan.

Wu Feng Lou consists of the lower hall, middle hall and main hall, called the three halls, arranged from the front to the back along the axial line of the whole residence. The lower hall is the vestibule, while the middle one is the big hall for clan get-together, and both are single storied. The main hall mostly consists of from three to five stories.

The center of the ground floor is the ancestral hall, erected with ancestral tablets. Its left, right and upper floors are living rooms for various families. The three halls are separated by a small yard, its left and right sides each having a wing hall which has passage leading to the horizontal house. The so-called horizontal house refers to the strip-shaped Long house parallel to the axial line. It also serves as living rooms for various families, the number of floors increasing steadily from the front to the back, until, finally, its height is close to that of the main hall. Centered on the main hall, the two horizontal houses look like the wings of a big bird surrounding and protecting the left and right sides. In a stretch manner, it looks like a phoenix spreading its wings, hence is called a "five-phoenix house" .