The cave dwellers of the 21st century in China

The last decade the high-tech building industry increased in China in places like Beijing and Shangai. But just a few hundred miles away in de Shanxi province, over three million people still live in caves. People have been living in caves in Shanxi for around 5000 years. It is believed that at a certain moment a quarter of the population lived underground. These days around one-twelfth of Shanxi-ers live in caves.

Current cave-dwelling numbers may sound high, but in fact these communities are far from thriving. Most caves lie abandoned or are used to house the livestock of local farmers, a school and so on.

An example of a cave village is Lijiashan. You can find there whole communities of cave dwellers. This is a 550 year old cave village. In this village you can find hundreds of caves that scale nine different levels of a hillside. These terraced levels are linked by stone stairways that date back to the Ming Dynasty. Most homes still have paper windows rather than glass panes. There isn’t running water and a sewage system. Locals have to take their water of the nearby Yellow river. The owners of the caves sleep on large stone beds, known as ‘kang’. In the summer are they very cool. Underneath there are cavities so that fires can be lit inside them during the winter.

Most of the people who live in caves are old people. As soon as the children grow up they leave. Lack of home comforts is a reason for kids to leave cave houses. But also remoteness. Lijiashan is an eight-hour, triple-bus journey from Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi. The main reason why young people abandoned the cave villages is that living in caves is not very cool. Some families whom kinds left the house convert their home into a guesthouse with cave bedrooms where Chinese art students stay when they come to paint the unusual village landscape.

Cave homes are very kind to the environment. They are surrounded by thick earthen layers. That’s the reason why cave houses are very well insulated. They are protected against freezing winters and very hot summers. To built a cave house you need less building materials than a real house. And another positive thing is that a cave afford better protection from natural disasters such as earthquakes.