Abstract: Home and heritage is a pair of concepts mutually exclusive to each other. However, when home is empowered as heritage, the meaning of space experiences the process of reconstruction. Different groups make different meaning for one place, home is considered as a place of living for local residents while treated as heritage for red education for local government. But how it was understood by tourists, a group participating the process of meaning-making essential to the institutional system of interpretation, remains unknown. Therefore, the paper aims to explore what kinds of meaning a place with controversial attributes has for tourists, and how the meaning of home and heritage connected to each other. Kaiping Diaolou and Villages was used as a study case. Participant observation and interview methods were used for data collection and secondary data were also collected as supplement. The findings are: For tourists, Kaiping Diaolou and Villages is not only home with luxury and crisis but also the heritage of architecture and spirit. It was regarded as home because of the existence of living trance, and thought as a heritage for the empowerment. Home and heritage are connected to each other by time, emotion and economy. What behind it is a feeling of patriotism. The paper contributes to understand how conflicting meanings coexist in common space and helps to find ways to solve realistic contradiction of home and heritage in heritage protection and utilization.