Historical vicissitudes of grain storage environment of granaries in the North China Plain

Granary evolves over time, adopting various climate responsive strategies and accordingly producing different grain storage environments. Meanwhile, as a major grain-growing area since ancient times, the North China Plain has a huge demand for granaries. Therefore, this paper investigates the historical vicissitudes of grain storage environment in North China Plain. Four granaries built during different historical periods (ranging from AD 583 to AD 2002) were selected. While their architectural features were obtained via field surveys and literature review, additional information was collected from on-site measurements to mathematically simulate the grain storage environments created by them. Results show that the grain storage environment has not been significantly improved, as the number of hours for safe grain storage has increased only by 2.36% in the past 1400 years. Further analysis revealed that these historical granaries adopted two different strategies (temperature-first vs. humidity-first) that failed to create a desirable grain storage environment, thus calling for a deliberate trade-off between air temperature and relative humidity. The present study not only deepens our understanding of historical granaries typical in the North China Plain but also provides valuable practical implications for the design and construction of modern granaries.