The stilt houses，also known as pile dwelling or corner house, are widely scattered all over the Shizhu Tujia Autonomous County, especially in the Qiyao Mountain, Fangdou Mountain, and Hegu Ancient Street. As the miracle of national architectural technique and the precious cultural heritage of Tujia nationality, Tujia stilt houses boast sophisticated technology, ingenious design, and reasonable layout. Local stones and wooden materials are fully utilized to build a strong and earthquake-proof structure with exquisite cornices and rake angles. The intelligent Tujia carpenters carefully build the wooden pillars, beams, and planks into the solid stilt houses with the tools of axes, saws, ink markers, and chisels, etc. In the middle of the stilt houses are the halls for worship and social activities, with the wing room or principal room on both sides, and the kitchen and the fireplace on the far sides, the dwelling rooms upstairs, the pens and woodsheds below the pillars.

Tujia stilt houses and their building customs form its architectural culture, which is of great value to the research on social civilization and architectural science of Tujia people in Chongqing. By protecting the stilt houses in Chongqing, the “living fossil” of Tujia history and culture can be preserved.

With the ever-changing social development and people's living concept, as well as the acceleration of the old city reconstruction and new rural construction in Chongqing, young people are no longer willing to live in stilt houses, and they show no interest in learning-related building techniques. So there is a lack of qualified successors for the Tujia stilt house building, and its inheritance and preservation are facing extremely severe challenges.

Municipal-level representative inheritors: Liu Chengbai, Liu Chenghai