Baishe, Shaanxi: 35° 13' 23'' N, 109° 59' 30'' E
China makes about 12.6 billion pairs of shoes a year, or 63 percent of the global market. China also builds 70 percent of the planet’s phones, 80 percent of the world’s solar cells, and at least 90 percent of humankind’s personal computers. In addition, more people live in caves in China—roughly 30 to 40 million—than anywhere else on Earth. But who, I’d like to know, is doing the cave census?
We are walking through north Shaanxi Province, Liu Lifeng and I.
Liu is a cultural expert, world traveler, former basketball player, and Shaanxi-bred. Together, we huff up and down parched gullies in the famous Yellow Earth Plateau. We make for a scraggly tuft of trees. All the leaves are browned by cold. This is the village of Baishe. Wind-chapped faces squint out at us—from cave entrances.
“Warm in the winter, cool in the summer,” says Tong Yue, deploying a cave sales pitch that must date from the Pleistocene. “Cheap to build too.”
In Baishe, Liu Lifeng tours a cave house used by Communist party officials during and after China’s civil war. Villagers have turned the underground shelter into a museum.
Out of Eden Walk
Tong’s cave isn’t natural. Like tens of thousands of other yaodong, or cave houses, pocking rural Shaanxi, it’s a work of human wit grounded in a super-abundant local material: dirt. Yellow loess blown from Mongolia, to be exact: Millions upon millions of tons of it, carried by dust storms and compacted into ochre sediments layered hundreds of feet deep. This well-traveled soil coats everything in northern Shaanxi. Cars. Orchards. Lunchtime noodles. Eyelashes. Night dreams. Its texture is soft enough to sculpt with a spade but dense enough to be thermically insulating. A perfect cave-digging substrate. Cave construction is collaborative. It goes something like this.
Fortified by a few doses of baijiu, an eye-watering grain liquor, Tong and his neighbors draw a 40-foot by 40-foot quadrangle into the dust. At this stage, an arduous months-long phase of hand-digging commences. Imagine a perfectly square swimming pool—waterless, of course—20 or more feet deep. This is the sunken courtyard, a dikengyuan. The actual cave residences are tunneled into the walls at the bottom of the pit. Such curved-roofed living quarters extend back 30 or more feet into the earth. Their entrances are sealed against the elements with plank doors and dainty sash windows. The interiors are whitewashed with lime and heated—even today, an age of universal electrification in China—by a wood- or coal-fired stove tucked into large, flat, elevated concrete platform. These are kang, or heated beds. (The Yellow Earth Plateau is cold.) The overall effect is cozy, in a post-apocalyptic sort of way.
The interior of a yaodong hotel in Baishe. All the tea you can drink—and a space heater.
Paul Salopek
Thirty years ago, before modern construction methods made inroads, underground villages like Baishe were all but invisible to passersby.
“But most of us moved to the surface in the nineties,” says Tong, 66, an apple farmer. “It’s too hard, carrying things up and down from your cave all the time.”
And it’s true.
Today, many of Baishe’s aging residents seem to have opted for ordinary homes. Or quit the village altogether. Hundreds of millions of rural Chinese have emigrated to cities in recent decades. The grizzled inhabitants of the Yellow Earth Plateau have added an intermediary step in that mass evacuation: migrating upward first, then out. Liu and I hike past hundreds of abandoned cave houses. Some are padlocked. Others gape open to the bitter winds. Shepherds stable their flocks in empty cave homes dug into hillsides. The sheep’s sharp little hooves crunch shards of old crockery into the floor dust.
Once accommodating millions in rural Shaanxi Province, many cave houses are locked up now, abandoned as people built modern, aboveground homes or moved to cities.
Paul Salopek
This renders the overall effect of traversing northern Shaanxi a bit eerie, like rambling through a vast, depopulated, caveman diorama.
“People are filling in the sunken courtyards and reusing that land for farming,” says Xi Bao An, who is trying to salvage his family yaodong in Baishe by renting it out as a novelty tourist lodge.
Cave dwellings feature with unexpected prominence in China’s recent history. Mao lived in a cave house when making his headquarters in gritty north Shaanxi. So did China’s current president Xi Jinping, who as a teenager was sent by the Communist Party to the hinterland region to do farm work. The cave villages of the Yellow Earth Plateau served as outposts in China’s civil war. Some were used as reeducation camps during the Cultural Revolution.
“The son of one of those prisoners recently came back,” Xi, the cave hotelier says, hopefully. “He rented a three-cave complex for a big business party.”
Liu and I stay at Xi’s place.
The subterranean rooms are spare, clean, bunkerlike. In the acute geological silence, I prop my feet by a space heater. The pillow on the platform bed is stenciled with the aching English phrase: “I hope you’re here for me.” Outside, a frosty dawn sky will materialize in the shape of a square.
