Around 1920 BCE, a Bronze Age farming settlement on the upper reaches of the Yellow River, on what is now the Gansu-Qinghai border, was struck by a catastrophe so sudden that its residents had no time to flee. Cave dwellings collapsed on families in the middle of daily life, sealing bodies, meals, and tools in place in a single instant — preserved, much like the Roman town of Pompeii, by the very disaster that destroyed them. Archaeologists now know the site as Lajia, a settlement of the Bronze Age Qijia culture (roughly 2300–1500 BCE) whose excavation has yielded some of the most emotionally striking and scientifically important finds of Chinese prehistoric archaeology.
Systematic excavation of Lajia took place between 1999 and 2004, revealing a settlement of semi-subterranean cave-like dwellings dug into loess soil along a river terrace. The most haunting discoveries came from inside these collapsed houses: in one dwelling, archaeologists recovered the skeletons of twelve individuals who died together, and ancient DNA analysis of their remains has since offered researchers rare insight into the family and kinship structures of a Bronze Age Chinese community. In another house, excavators found a mother's skeleton kneeling over her child, arms still wrapped around the smaller body in a final, futile gesture of protection — an image now displayed at the Lajia Ruins Museum that has made the site widely known in China as the country's own "Pompeii."