Tulou originated in the central and western regions of China, with drought and little rain. The rich loess layer became a natural building material in the early stage of Chinese civilization. The structure system of adobe buildings has probably gone through three stages: covering soil structure system (cave dwelling, cave dwelling), rammed soil structure system and adobe structure system. As early as the Stone Age, primitive people built all kinds of adobe buildings, and there were round and square semi-cellar houses in magnetic mountain culture, Peiligang and Dadiwan cultures 7,000 years ago. About 4000 years ago, the most distinctive technology of rammed earth was the village communities and city walls built with rammed earth. With the appearance of adobe structure, adobe architecture has reached a high level in retaining the dependence between man and nature and the aesthetic feeling of form. Most of the tangible historical materials of adobe buildings that we can see today remain in the northwest of the Loess Plateau. With the progress of the times and the development of social economy, clay bricks have gradually replaced adobe and rammed walls in rural housing construction, making this ancient building material gradually die out. However, with the arrival of the era of ecological civilization, this human treasure once forgotten by industrial civilization has once again attracted the attention of people of insight.
Adobe architecture, as one of the earliest ways of human construction, has its cultural relics left in ancient cultural sites in many places, such as the Great Wall site, tombs and the relocation of the old city. You can see the traces of ancient people using adobe architecture. Earth buildings are widely distributed, almost all over the world. Most rural residents within 640,000 square kilometers of the Loess Plateau in China still live in caves and other adobe buildings. Due to the differences in geographical conditions, lifestyles, historical traditions and national customs, adobe buildings in different regions also have their own characteristics in construction technology and architectural style, and become an integral part of architectural culture in various countries. The multi-storey earth building in Yongding, Fujian Province is a miracle of world architecture.