Is it? Chinese buildings are never old because China built in wood rather than stone. If you want to avoid rebuilding your buildings, they have to be made from permanent materials.
Wood is surprisingly long-lasting in reasonably dry environments as long as fire does not consume it.
Norway still has more than a dozen wooden churches built in the 1100s-1200s, and on farms in the inland there are more wood buildings dating back several hundred years than we can count.
> If you want to avoid rebuilding your buildings, they have to be made from permanent materials.
I’m not sure how well that works when the ground keeps moving. Some places manage it to a degree, but the cultures that come to mind (Aztec) weren’t on land as shaky as Japan.
I'd reconsider that. The Aztec culture was spread over much of central and southern Mexico, a region known for having an abundance of tectonic and also even volcanic instability. Even the case of their capital is almost amusing in that it was built over sand and mud, on a lake, in the middle of a valley severely prone to very heavy earthquakes.
I saw a documentary about the forbidden city architecture, and despite the wood it’s really a great lasting one.
An interesting takeaway was that lightning strike fires have been a major "need to rebuild everything from scratch" trigger until very recently actually. I’m always amazed at how much time it took to come with things that are all in all rather trivial to build while bringing a major difference on the table.
The documentary also went through seismic tests, explaining how the architecture was so resilient to them, how the fact that all peaces are really just plugged in together and relatively easy to replace with a fresh new copy, even large steels and pillars. Truly amazing masterpiece.
Norway still has more than a dozen wooden churches built in the 1100s-1200s, and on farms in the inland there are more wood buildings dating back several hundred years than we can count.