From 15-18 September, the CUHK History and Anthropology AOE and Shaanxi Normal University arranged a field seminar in and around Xi’an.

The itinerary was arranged by Micah Muscolino at Oxford, and took us to about 8 villages in Baishui 白水县 and Chengcheng 澄城县 Counties, along with a large scale water reclamation project, and two gorgeous temples.

Most of what we were doing was to see the long history of terracing, which is a way of keeping the water in the soil, and keeping the soil in one spot. This is especially important in the “Yellow Earth” region of central China, where the soil is notoriously soft and wispy. Besides the terraces, the most notable feature of the landscape is deep gullies, which are created from water erosion. Even with plant cover, the ground just doesn’t want to stay still.

On the other hand, because the soil is so soft, it is really easy to work. People compress it into walls between fields to stop the wind, and famously dig houses (窑洞) into the hillsides. Mao and the Yan’an communists lived in these during the 1930s and 40s, and people think of it as a hardship. Surely it was, but the houses themselves are very comfortable – since the walls are two meters thick, the cave houses stay cool in summer and warm in winter.