Loess Plateau

Loess Plateau
The Loess Plateau (shaded)
Traditional Chinese
Simplified Chinese
Literal meaning	The Yellow Earth Plateau
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Huángtǔ Gāoyuán

The Loess Plateau, also known as the Huangtu Plateau, is a 640,000 km² plateau located around the Wei River valley and the southern half of the Ordos Loop of the Yellow River in central China. It covers almost all of the provinces of Shaanxi and Shanxi and extends into parts of Gansu, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia. It was enormously important to Chinese history, as it formed the cradle of Chinese civilization and its eroded silt is responsible for the great fertility of the North China Plain, along with the repeated and massively destructive floods of the Yellow River. Its soil has been called "most highly erodible... on earth" and conservation efforts and land management are a major focus of modern Chinese agriculture.

The area is named for its most distinctive feature, the highly friable "loess" (German for "loose"; Chinese: , huángtǔ, "yellow earth") soil that has been deposited by wind storms over the ages.

Historically the Loess Plateau has provided simple yet insulated shelter from the cold winter and hot summer in the region, as homes called yaodong (窰洞) were often carved into the loess soil; in medieval times people stayed here to grow rice; some families still live in this kind of shelter in modern times. During the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake, 830,000 people were killed as a result of collapsing loess caves. The yaodongs that are best known to the world are perhaps those in Yan'an where the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong headquartered in 1930s. When Edgar Snow, the author of Red Star Over China, visited Mao and his party, he lived in a yaodong. In ancient times, this region was also an important center of the Silk Road. Goods moving by caravan to the west included gold, rubies, jade, textiles, coral, ivory, and art works. In the opposite direction moved bronze weapons, furs, ceramics, and cinnamon bark.