In 2006, approximately 737.42 million people of various ethnic origins lived in the rural areas of China. The forms of their traditional housing (see image 1) range from floor housing to chair housing, from building types like the yurt (5, the following numbers refer to abbreviations on image 1) and tents, block houses and so-called sunken or grub huts in the sub-arctic far north, from clay buildings to stone houses in the high mountains in the west (24, 27), to pile dwellings (25, 26) in the subtropical and tropical south. For the core area of Han Chinese culture, seven large settlement r…