LIWANG, China -- Two years ago, Ma Xiuhua's family finally gave up on the parched fields of their poor mountain village and moved to this town to try their hand at buying and selling vegetables. Tired of fighting years of drought, they said goodbye to the small mud-brick house -- home to Ma, her husband, their two children and her in-laws -- and set out to find an in-town apartment to rent.
But with a combined income of $13 a month, the family could not afford the new apartment blocks that line the road in this sleepy rural township in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region of northwest China, a sign of the bit of prosperity that has crept into even China's most impoverished regions. So they pay $4 a month instead for a more modest dwelling a little down the road: one room, no view, poor light, no ventilation. It is, in fact, a cave."In our village, there was no water and nothing to eat -- we had to go down the mountain," said Ma, a shy 22-year-old, wearing the white cap of the Muslim Hui minority. "This is what we could afford. We are very poor."
Even as urban Chinese aspire to high-rise condos with dishwashers and microwaves, cave-dwelling remains common in many rural areas of northwest China, where the yellow loess soil is well suited to digging caves.
Though hardly the abode of choice, cave-dwelling is a Chinese tradition dating back to the Neolithic age, said professor Shou Xing of Beijing University's Sociology and Anthropology Research Institute.
And even in modern times, caves have had their moments of glory: during the 1934-35 Long March, Mao Tse-tung and his fellow Communists hid in caves to avoid detection by Nationalist troops. And so it is with a touch of pride that Ma Kuanca, Ma Xiuhua's gray-bearded father-in-law, explains that the Mas' rental cave dates back to at least revolutionary days -- although he concedes that there is no evidence that Mao or anyone else famous ever slept there.
But for the Ma family, the bottom line is that a cave is the best they can do, and they have tried to make this irregular 15-by-30-foot hole dug into a mountainside into a comfortable home, papering curved earthen walls with old newspapers, hanging framed family photos and buying a second-hand television set "for the young people" to pass long winter nights. Their landlord has rigged up electricity and a light bulb and affixed to the opening in the mountainside a sturdy front door of wood.
The front part of the cave has a small cooking stove, the television and a small table. The back, set off by a cabinet and hanging quilt, contains a bed where the extended family sleeps. There is no toilet or running water, and the Mas fetch water from a collecting pool, a quarter mile away.
Although there are no exact statistics about how many Chinese people live in caves, many villages in northwest China's poorer areas still have at least some residents who are cave-dwellers, although few are renters. In general, as these cave-dwellers prosper a bit, they tend to move, or build houses. In farming areas, the abandoned cave often serves as a barn for the animals.
Along the dirt road that wraps around the hillside in Kaicheng, Ma Beili recently abandoned just such a house to return to his former cave when rain soaked a support beam of the roof and rot set in.
"Cool in the summer, warm in the winter," said Ma Beili, pointing to the cave. "Even when the house was still in good repair, in the winter I would come to sleep here.