Abstract:The Yunnan–Vietnam Railway is an important transnational meter-gauge railway in modern Chinese history. Rural station settlements along the line embody multiple attributes, including railway heritage, local transportation, and rural life. Existing studies have largely focused on resource inventories or static descriptions of urban stations and representative station buildings, with limited attention to ordinary rural station settlements. Taking Xujiadu Village, a rural station settlement along the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway, as a case study, this research introduces morphological gene theory. It develops an analytical framework comprising structural genes and elemental genes. By integrating GIS-based spatial analysis, morphological quantification, and field investigation, the study systematically identifies and graphically interprets the settlement's morphological characteristics.The results show that, at the structural-gene level, the settlement exhibits a 'mountain–water–village– railway–farmland' spatial sequence. Its boundary is characterized by a 'clustered base with a linear tendency,' its public spaces form a linear structure consisting of 'one primary and two secondary' spaces, and its road network presents a juxtaposition of a wide railway corridor and narrow village lanes. At the elemental-gene level, the architectural morphology displays a hybrid character formed by the superimposition of multiple elements. The evolution of the settlement's morphological genes can be divided into three stages: the original-base stage, the embedded-integration stage, and the decline-differentiation stage. This process reveals a hierarchical evolutionary mechanism of 'constraint by the original base - guidance through railway insertion - activation by the station-related economy - differentiation under functional decline.'
