Huachuan, China - Li Xiulan says that for all of her 73 winters in China's frigid northeast, her best weapon against the biting cold has been a pile of bricks.

Like millions of northern Chinese, Li wakes up every morning on a kang - a traditional brick sleeping platform heated from below by burning straw or coal during the long, dark winter.

"Without the kang, winter would be unbearable," she said, bundled in layers of sweaters and warming her hands before the gentle heat of the kang in her grandchildren's bedroom.

Environmentalists worry that kangs waste energy and add to choking air pollution. But people here say it's the only way to survive in China's version of Siberia, where the winter sun sets at 3 p.m. and temperatures can plunge to 40 below zero.

For centuries, the kang - pronounced "kahng" - has been the center of winter life in the northeast. Families crowd together on them to sleep under mountains of quilts. Children play on them during the day. Parents do as many chores as they can on them.

"All day, if there's nothing else to do, we're on the kang," said Zhou Yuyong, 27, a soybean farmer on the outskirts of Huachuan, near the border with Russia.

In Beijing and other northern cities, traditional homes with kangs have fallen to the wrecking ball, making way for apartment blocks with steam radiators. Cities have banned the burning of the coal bricks that fueled kangs and contributed to eye-searing smog.

But in the countryside, kangs have survived the arrival of electricity, mobile phones and the Internet. Families gather on them to watch satellite television and DVDs.

An estimated 80 percent to 90 percent of farm families in China's northeast use kangs, said Wang Hongyang, a professor at the Resource and Environment Institute of the Northeastern Agricultural University in Harbin, capital of China's northernmost province, Heilongjiang.

Scientists warn that kangs waste fuel, pollute the atmosphere and endanger the health of farm families by releasing carbon monoxide and other dan gerous gases indoors.

Towns throughout the northeast are wreathed in smoke as families fire up their kangs for the evening. More prosperous homes emit the fetid odor of burning coal.

"In order to protect the environment, the government should encourage and guide farmers to give up using kangs," Wang said. "But the kang cannot be phased out in a short time because the farmers in these areas depend on them."

The government and environmental groups have sponsored research to produce alternatives using such things as natural gas from decomposing farm waste.
But for many families, the kang is close to perfect.

The furnace doubles as a heat source for the kitchen stove and burns roots, corn stalks and other vegetation that come free, as a byproduct of their crops.

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