Word: loess
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Land. The Border Region, a wilderness of loess cut into wild shapes by streams, broken by valleys and woodland, is generally fertile, but there is little rainfall. The Communists are slowly changing the face of this churlish land. Where the soil is cultivable, they have planted crops. Villages have plenty of pigs and chickens. Generally the inhabitants look sturdy, well-fed, well-clothed. The typical village home is an arched loess cave, whitewashed and faced with wood...
...cushion the new line against pressure from the west, the Japanese seemed also to be building a defense belt beyond the railroad. There was a worse, though still remote possibility: from Loyang, the Japanese might try to push on westward through the famed Tungkwan mountain pass, spill into the loess plain of Shansi. Then even China's truck roads to Russia would be in peril...
Yenan the city is no magnet to correspondents. Battered by continuous Jap bombings, it is a rubble heap inside ancient mud-and-stone walls; its inhabitants live in caves carved from the yellow loess mountains. But it is the political capital of North China's guerrilla areas with their 30 to 40 million inhabitants, and the military headquarters of a potentially powerful force of 500,000 regulars (a new high), perhaps a million irregulars...