China's Cave Dwellers Fight to Keep the Homes They've Inhabited for Thousands of Years

In one of the remotest areas a China, a group of people who have been dwelling in shelters carved into caves and mountains for thousands of years is fighting attempts by local authorities to move them to modern apartments.

The "cave dwellers" of Shanxi province in southwestern China have been living in the area that can only be accessed via a mountainous footpath for about 5,000 years, according to Lonely Planet.

The dwellers live in extreme poverty. Although some homes are now hooked up to the country's electrical grid, many still do not have running water.

"The village's nine terraced levels are linked by stone stairways that date back to the Ming Dynasty, and most homes still have paper windows rather than glass panel," Lonely Planet says of Lijiashan, a 550-year-old cave village that hugs a hillside set back from the Yellow River. "Inside, their owners sleep on large stone beds, known as kang; cool in the summer, but with cavities underneath so that fires can be lit inside them during the winter months."

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China is attempting to alleviate the country's extreme poverty by 2020, so local authorities are trying to entice the remaining cave dwellers to give up their homes for more modern apartments, TRT World reported.

Zhong is another village located in a massive cave protected by the locally-run Getu River Tourism Administration. Twenty-three families living in the village were each offered $9,500 to leave because officials said residents were not taking care of the cave and it was uninhabitable, especially for tourists staying in hostels. Only five families agreed to move.

“The residents of this cave should be the administrators of tourism here, regardless of whether or not we are paid,” Wang Qiguo, the head of the local village who established its first hostel, told the Times.

The chief complaints by the cave-dwellers, apart from not wanting to leave their ancestral homes, are that the apartments offered are not well-built, nor are they large enough.