China's traditional villages have become the largest group of protected agricultural civilization heritage sites in the world. Over the years, President Xi Jinping has inspected multiple traditional villages around the country, making instructions on the preservation of such villages. In Xi's eyes, rural civilization is the mainstay of the history of Chinese civilization, and villages are carriers of the civilization. These ancient villages, based on diverse styles of dwellings and scattered throughout the country, have developed their own unique character under the nurturing influence of local nature and culture. The wisdom of harmonious coexistence between humanity and nature, passed down for centuries, has in turn supported the lives of those who call these lands home, ultimately becoming a spiritual haven for villagers. In this series, the Global Times explores five types of unique and representative traditional villages around China to discover the secrets of their unceasing vitality.
Han Xiulin has lived in Zhangjiata village, North China's Shanxi Province, for more than 40 years, long enough to see her become a grandmother. Though small, the courtyard she shares with her husband contains four traditional cave dwellings, known in Chinese as yaodong.
These cave dwellings are like the earth's open eyes. Embedded in the mountain walls, they also resemble underground corridors stretching deep beneath thick layers of loess. Carved out with hoes and tampers, these homes are the ingenious creations of local people, embodying their wisdom in combating drought and harsh cold.
The green onions thriving in the yard in front of Han's cave dwellings are living examples of the architectural wisdom of the village, which has been built in such a way that sunlight is always able to shine on the gardens where produce is grown while gentle coolness and dryness are maintained in the living and storage spaces.
The sunlight was just right. While Han was loosening the soil around her green onion sprouts, over 200 kilometers away on the loess plateau is Zhenjiawan village in Yan'an, Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, where stonemason Zhen Suiyang was busy repairing cave dwellings for other villagers. A smear of yellow loess mud holds the red bricks firmly in place. In his eyes, building these yaodong are like borrowing a house from the earth as all the materials came from the land itself. Even when an abandoned cave eventually collapses, it will slowly return to loess, truly embodying the cycle of "from nature, back to nature."
Bai Yun, the Party secretary of Zhenjiawan village, told the Global Times that be they old or young, villagers are always longing to return to their cave dwellings to recharge their spirits, rest on heated earthen beds and savor a bowl of millet porridge cooked inside the cave. They know that the yaodong is their root; no matter where life takes them, the scent of the loess will always pull them back home.
Life philosophy hidden in details
Founded in the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), Zhenjiawan village has endured for more than seven centuries. Its 97 courtyards and 258 caves form the largest, best-preserved cave-dwelling village in northern Shaanxi Province. Climbing up the loess plateau and looking down, rows of cave dwellings, cut neatly into the mountainside, can be seen rising in a layered sequence from the ravines. A small river winds before the village. This is Qingping Bay, the very place writer Shi Tiesheng once depicted in his works.
Stonemason Zhen has worked on building and repairing these cave dwellings in the village for more than four decades. Each time his team creates a cave dwelling, it is a process of having a conversation with nature. They first select a sun-facing cliff surface, then use pickaxes to carve out a steep "cliff wall," digging inward to form an arched cavity. Last, they smooth the walls with a mixture of wheat straw and loess known as "mud plaster." Then they carry stones up and down the hills, sticking them together with loess mud and setting them one by one, adjusting and readjusting the angle until they hold.
"The hardest part is always getting the arch right, the angle of the entrance," the stonemason told the Global Times. "Back then we had no tools besides a ruler."
Skilled "cave artisans" are also capable of building heated earthen beds known as kang, stoves, and chimneys. The heated earthen bed is a distinctive feature of a cave dwelling. Every traditional cave has one, as no regular beds are used. Well-crafted kang beds and stoves by master craftsmen ensure smooth smoke ventilation without backflow, efficient wood usage, and high heat retention, the stonemason introduced.
Zhen Chunyan, who left to work in the city but returned to the village in her 30s, still remembers the words often spoken by the elders in the village: "Cave dwellings are like quilts made of loess for us, warm in winter and cool in summer, and all without spending money on electricity."
In her family's yaodong, a kang bed stretches from the window all the way to the stove. Cooking smoke flows through the "fire channel" beneath the kang, warming it. In the evening, her family gathers on the kang to eat, chat, while children roll around. The cave door faces southeast, avoiding cold northwest winds and allowing in sunlight from morning until afternoon. The windows are "grid-style." Covered with translucent hemp paper in the winter, which is removed in the summer for ventilation, they are simple yet practical.
Duan Degang, a professor at the Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology who has been investigating and researching yaodong architecture for years, told the Global Times that these centuries-old villages with cave residences, like Zhenjiawan, embody the traditional Chinese life philosophy of maintaining harmony between humans and nature.
Spiritual homeland
In Zhen Chunyan's heart, the yaodong cave dwellings in her village are far more than just houses - they are vessels of heritage and bloodlines. Every wedding, funeral, and festival is intimately intertwined with these earthen homes. When a couple gets married, a bright red "double happiness" character (囍) is pasted on the cave's wall, new bedding is spread out on the kang bed, and elders lovingly comb the bride's hair right inside the yaodong, blessing the couple to "take root in the yellow earth and enjoy a flourishing life."
During the Spring Festival, the windows of the yaodong transform into "vibrant canvases." Red paper cuttings - shaped into the character for magpies and sheaves of grain - are pressed onto the windowpanes. When sunlight streams through, their auspicious shadows dance across the cave's walls. On the first day of the Chinese New Year, the whole village visits each household in turn; stepping through a cave's doorway, they first pay respects to the Kitchen God, then sip a bowl of homemade rice wine.
In Zhen's memory, the door to her family's yaodong was always left wide open during that day, as if inviting any passerby to come in, sit down, and share a moment of warmth.
In Zhangjiata village, which has a history stretching back around 300 years, yaodong cave dwellings have also strengthened the close relationships among villagers. Han Xiulin's yaodong and the other 506 households are interconnected by a network of tunnels, allowing residents to move freely between them and making the entire village appear like a reversed version of the Chinese character for "fortune" (福). During the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1931-45), villagers used these tunnels beneath the caves as vital networks for passing messages and distributing food among their neighbors.
"'To earn a living through our own hands, wisdom, and diligence' has always been our family motto since ancient times, and it's been passed down to this day," Wang Jianhua, a villager from Zhangjiata, told the Global Times, adding that these words have become a time-honored creed shaped by countless days and nights spent building, repairing, and living in yaodong cave dwellings.
Today, these ancient village' caves have entered a new chapter.
In Zhenjiawan village, newly built yaodong cave dwellings have been transformed into guesthouses, while older ones, carefully preserved, serve as film sets. Farmland is managed collectively, with profits shared among villagers. Through livestreaming, agricultural products have found new markets. And in Zhangjiata, the locals have converted some caves with tunnels into an underground folk museum, displaying tools used by older generations, components of ancient architecture, and photographs documenting the village's history.
In other villages on the loess plateau, cave dwellings retain their main living functions while utilizing adjacent caves to create independent bathrooms equipped with modern facilities such as temperature-controlled showers and smart toilets. Solar-powered lights have been added at the cave entrances to illuminate the villagers' way home.
As the number of visitors to the village gradually increased, the villagers began to realize the cultural significance of their daily living spaces. "Every brick and tile here represents our collective memory of the village. Now, I want to share my stories with more people," Wang, who has turned into a local tour guide, told the Global Times.
Source: Global Times:
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Contact Person: Anna Li
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City: Beijing
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