This study is an attempt to understand and describe the compositional principles of Chaoshan traditional houses (CTH) through a computational space syntax. In this approach, the space syntax is used to describe and verify the compositional rules of Chaoshan houses. Chaoshan rural residence is a classical Lingnan style building in Chaoshan area of eastern Guangdong province, associated with Teo-Swa people, a Han Chinese minority. This study takes the example the prototypes existing in the village of Zhupu, Haojiang District, Shantou city as a case study, to analyse the spatial form of the residences. The Zhupu village houses date from the Qing Dynasty - Qianlong period, around 1700 AD. The hypothesis of this study is that CTH buildings are a result of a space compositional rule system that can be described and replicated through a computational design methodology. This study will establish a computational architectural syntax, and is the first stage of an extended research work on the evolution of Chaoshan residential types. The understanding of this evolution may help, as future work, to develop urban strategies for adaptation of the CTH heritage buildings to the contemporary living conditions. As the result of this study is a computational 3D graphics modelling algorithm, the ability of the system to generate the house layouts is not limited to the reconstruction of existing typologies of CTH and its variations. The same algorithm will allow the generation of new housing schemes, with adaptation to design variables extracted from a particular site and region.