Hundreds of years ago, legend has it, the Chettiars were driven out of their coastal homeland to settle on the hot and inhospitable plains east of Madurai. Finding the land unsuitable for agriculture, they turned to trade — and they were extravagantly good at it.

From the 19th century until the 1950s, the riches of the world poured into Chettinad, dragged from the coast by ox-drawn cart to this dusty, fly-blown corner of rural southern India. The Chettiars were indispensable as middlemen between the colonial British and local peoples — not just in India but across Burma, Malaya, Ceylon and Singapore — and they used their riches to build extraordinary mansions across the region.

Burmese teak, Italian marble, English cast-iron railings, Belgian mirrors, Venetian glass: the Chettiars were inspired by buildings they saw on their travels, and they combined wildly disparate elements with iconoclastic gusto. Gothic arches alongside Greek colonnades, stained glass windows beside Roccoco swags, Burmese carved roofs over Art Deco frontages and statues of Lakshmi over ranks of British soldiers. Exuberant, irreverent and stylistically chaotic, they are the chimeric offspring of a magpie sensibility — not tasteless as much as taste-free.

We’re not just talking a few buildings here. There are over 10,000 of these mansions still standing today, most of them unrestored and crumbling, dotted across 70 villages. A few of them are open to visitors, while others can only be viewed from the outside (still a surreal and impressive experience).

As you’ll probably have guessed, the wealth of the Chettiars didn’t last. As the British Empire crumbled and World Wars disrupted global trade routes, once-great families faded from importance, moving away to the cities and leaving their homes to the guardianship of caretakers (at best), or to rack and ruin (at worst). Once prosperous villages which relied on these great houses gradually became like ghost towns.

Today, Chettinad is still a backwater, but that’s changing — mostly due to the efforts of one woman. When Meenakshi Meyyappan, or ‘Aachi’, decided to transform her husband’s ancestral property into a bougie hotel — the Bangala — in 1999, she started the ball rolling. Today, the Bangala runs an annual Heritage & Cultural Festival to raise funds for conservation, and several dilapidated mansions have already been restored as a result.