A cave dwelling is a home dug out of loess. Loess can bear a load and its temperature does not easily follow the heat and cold outside, so people dug houses into hillsides and lived in them.
In the late Yangshao period, around 3000 BCE, true cave dwellings had appeared in the loess region. The Yanggua site in Ning County, Gansu, is the earliest known example.
In the Longshan period, around 2300 BCE, cave dwellings with vertically dug forecourts appeared at sites such as Taosi and Dongxiafeng, and cave living became a major dwelling form in the loess region.
In the Ming and Qing cave dwellings spread widely across the northern loess plateau and continued as a dwelling form still inhabited by tens of millions of people today.
Loess Cave Dwellings is the class in the chapter on Architecture on cave houses. It covers the dwelling form of the Loess Plateau in which houses are dug into hillsides and the ground: examples already exist in the late Yangshao period, cave living became a major dwelling form in the loess region in the Longshan period, and in the Ming and Qing it spread widely across the northern loess plateau.
