Generations of Chinese have chosen to dig a long-lasting, earthquake-proof home in the ground. But the tradition is in danger of dying out, reports Fintan O'Toole, in Dang Jia Pe, Shaanxi.
The two young men, one in a brown casual jacket, the other in a clean white shirt, are smoothing the sides of long boards of wood that are propped up on rough trestles. As they run their planes with deft strokes along the rough edges, Kou Kanggan looks placidly at the whorls of wood shavings that drift gently down onto the soft yellow-brown floor. He is 38, a small man with tousled hair, tobacco stains on his teeth and a cigarette dangling from his right hand. He tells me contentedly that the carpenters have come to prepare the boards for his mother's coffin.
I would have assumed that his mother was dead and offered my condolences if I had not been speaking a few minutes earlier to Mr Kou's 65-year-old neighbour Sun Zhengyin. Mr Sun, a thin, handsome man with a balding head and wispy beard, in both of which the black is still holding out against the grey, had happily shown me the boards for his own coffin. He is full of vigour and in fine health but, he says, it is the tradition round here to have the wood for your coffin ready in good time. That way, you can be sure of a decent burial and the funeral won't be too much of a burden on your children.
This matter-of-fact preparation for death may be a reflection of millennia of hard existence on the Loess Plateau, an area the size of France that stretches across central China and is home to around 70 million people. The plateau is covered, to an average depth of 150 metres, with a fine yellowish-brown silt whose blessings and curses define the lot of the archetypal Chinese peasant.
On the one hand, the loess is a rich soil, full of nutrients, and its abundance made the area the cradle of Chinese Han civilisation. The old imperial capital Xian, location of the famous terracotta warriors, is 200 kilometres east of the small village, Dang Jia Pe, where the Kou and Sun families live.
On the other hand, the large populations it has supported have been at the mercy of its vagaries, the meagre rain that comes mostly in cruel downpours, the flash floods that sweep across it, the erosion to which the soft soil offers little resistance, the tens of thousands of recorded earthquakes that seem to express its congenital instability.
But the calmness with which the Kous and the Suns can contemplate the inevitability of death may also have something to do with the extraordinary houses in which they live. Being buried six feet under may not seem so fearful when they are already 20 feet under. For they and a dozen other families in Dang Jia Pe live in large holes in the ground.
If you walk 10 metres from the road, then past a small orchard, around some stately oak trees teeming with woodpeckers, and then past some neatly rounded, old-fashioned haystacks, you come to a series of open pits, invisible until you are close enough to be in danger of falling in. Way down beneath your feet, there is a yard, sometimes planted with small trees or flower beds, like an Irish back garden, and occupied by a dog, or a bicycle, or a few hens, and a stack of firewood. Set around each yard is a series of arches, usually three on each side, one round, the other two pointed in a symmetry that seems almost Arabian.
Within each arch is a simple door, a window and an open fanlight at the top. Each door is the entrance to a small rectangular room, its walls the blank brownish yellow of the loess soil. In each yard, there is a small, covered hole that runs down another 10 metres to a well. The yard is carefully tilted so that every spare drop of rain runs down to this spot and is captured.
This set of pits is connected by an alleyway that has been dug behind them all, like a regular little street. From the alleyway, a series of neat double-doors gives access to each of the pits, as if this were a typical village of courtyard houses.
To the left of each door is a little indentation with a small wooden sign on which is stencilled in Chinese the name of the family and, in English, the number of the house. Sun Zhengyin and his wife Jia Linge live in hole "No.001".
To a western eye, the little street numbers, so unexpectedly normal in the midst of such strangeness, add a surreal touch, but in fact cave-dwelling is itself an aspect of Chinese normality. It marks the extraordinary continuity of Chinese culture.
People lived in caves on the Loess Plateau a hundred thousand years ago and as many as twenty million still do so. Some live in naturally occurring stone caves, some in caves cut into the sides of cliffs. Others, like the people of Dang Jia Pe, cut large rectangular pits into the ground and then burrow holes in their sides to serve as rooms.
THE CAVE-DWELLINGS may look primitive but they are in fact a sophisticated response to social and environmental conditions. For people who existed in a subsistence economy, clawing out a house in the ground meant using the resource they had - hard physical labour - instead of the ones they didn't have - bricks, wood, slates, stone. The cave houses use very little wood, so the trees that prevent further erosion of the loess soil didn't have to be cut down. (The vulnerability of the landscape can be traced back to massive deforestation two thousand years ago.) They offer better protection than above-ground structures do from the frequent earthquakes. They regulate temperatures in a region that has very cold winters and very hot summers.
And, as is now recognised by ecologists, they are environmentally sustainable, using local materials instead of energy-intensive imports. They are a testament to the hard work, skill and ingenuity that has allowed Chinese peasants to survive thousands of years of misfortune and oppression.
Sun Zhengyin tells me that he made his cave-dwelling entirely by himself. His grandparents had lived in the village but he himself lived in a house above ground a few miles way. After it was destroyed in an earthquake in 1973, however, he decided that it was safer and more comfortable to live underground. "I could only work on it at lunchtime and at night because I had to work on a collective farm," he remembers. "So it took me three years." But he believes the effort was well worth it.
"These houses are warm in the winter and cool in the summer. And we have much more room than we would have in an ordinary house." When I asked him how he knew the proper methods for building a cave-dwelling, he shrugs and says, "I just knew. My grandfather knew. My father knew. I knew - everybody knew." He is not really being modest - all the houses are made to the same pattern, and the design is clearly a part of local tradition. But if they were designed by an architect, they would be praised for being both ingenious and rather beautiful.
THERE ARE EIGHT separate rooms cut into the soil, arranged in carefully balanced proportions around the yard. Bunches of bright red chilli peppers hang from the wall outside one room, drying in the mildly filtered sunlight and adding a welcome splash of colour to the dull loess. (It is easy to understand why each of the caves in the underground village has a spray of vivid flowers or a lush tree in the yard, relieving the claustrophobic monotony of the clay walls.)
One room is a bedroom, with a bed, a chair and a TV - the caves have had an electricity supply since the 1960s. The walls are bone dry, and Mr Sun says that they remain so even when it's raining outside. Another room is a kitchen, and its brick oven is ingeniously connected through an air vent to the bedroom, making sure that none of the precious heat is wasted. Another room is used for raising rabbits, a fifth for dying the cloth that Jia Linge uses for making her family's clothes. Their daughter lived in another room until she got married. Now, her room is used to store the boards for their coffins.
THE HOUSES CAN last for a century or so - Kou Kanggan tells me that his was built by his great-grandfather. But it seems doubtful that the current ones will be renewed in Dang Jia Pe, at least as everyday dwellings. All of the inhabitants of Sun Zhengyin's row of a dozen pits are elderly. In another row nearby, the only inhabitant is a reclusive widower who is said to have moved out of a modern house after his wife died. In Kou Kanggan's row, there is a cluster of half a dozen families, but Mr Kou himself is not sure that he will stay in the cave for too much longer. He lives there with his wife, his mother and his young daughter, and he thinks his child might prefer to live in a normal house.
The family's annual income from farming is tiny - around 2,000 yuan (€200) a year. But he now has a job in a factory, earning €60 a month. And even though he says the cave-dwelling is perfectly comfortable, "if I get more land, I'll build a new house".
Even Sun Zhengyin, who is so proud of his house, has built a small shack beside his orchard above ground. His wife, Jia Linge, he says, has heart trouble and it's not good for her to have to walk up and down the steep tunnel that winds towards the underground dwelling. Their daughter has already moved out to a modern house.
She didn't have to go far. Out on the main road, less than a hundred metres from the old cave-dwellings, a new village of conventional modern houses has grown up over the last 20 years, almost literally looking down on the life underground. The houses have the redbricked walls, enclosed courtyards, white tiles and forbidding double doors with lion's-head knockers that symbolise rural prosperity in most of China. They are clean, bright and comfortably conventional. In their courtyards stands evidence of the source of the money that has been used to build them: boxes of apples ready-packed for sale to supermarkets.
With China's economic and agricultural reforms, villages like Dang Jia Pe have moved from collective subsistence farming to producing commodities for the market. A businessman from Sichuan province, far away to the south, buys the village's abundant crop of apples and shifts it off to the marketplace. The villagers now have cash and the younger people aspire to images of the good life that do not involve living in holes in the ground.
As a result, what used to a local tradition, a way of living in a treacherous environment that someone like Sun Zhengyin "just knew" 40 years ago, is becoming self-consciously exotic. Guan Baiping of the provincial government in Shaanxi, tells me that the best way to preserve the cave-dwellings when people no longer want to live in them might be to turn them into a tourist attraction. "If a company could come up with the investment, they could build a hotel here and let people visit the old village."
It is not so hard to imagine tourists wondering how marvellous it would be to live in a hole in the ground, before wandering back to their air-conditioned rooms.