China by Harry Alverson Franck — Read

A few years ago there was a great earthquake in Kansu. As the soil is almost sandy, with no tree-roots to hold it together, this did much damage. Millions of the people live in caves, and thousands were killed by being buried in these underground houses. We passed many places where the great road to Lanchow had been covered deep under the mountain-sides that had slid down when the earth shook. In others the whole road, with its four rows of willows and even the mule-paths in it, had been carried nearly half a mile or turned at right angles to its former course. The new road was a trail that climbed over the new hills wherever the first travelers after the earthquake had been able to get through.

One Chinese name for the earthquake is "Where the Earth Walked. " The landscape looked as if the earth had been boiled, leaving a ruined world, a world wearing away. There were places where all the population, all the terraced fields, all the villages had been wiped out. Elsewhere other people had come in, or those who had escaped the earthquake had rebuilt their towns. Most of mankind seem to be optimistic. People come back to live where such a calamity has happened, as if it could never be repeated.