“…In past decades, influenced by national and regional policies, studies of CTVs have sprung up in fields such as architecture (Liu et al, 2019), rural geography (Chen, Xie, & Li, 2020), sociology, and tourism (Gao & Wu, 2017), and have been followed by a flourishing rural construction practice movement (Lu & Qian, 2020). The existing regional studies of traditional villages have explored mining features of domestic architecture and identifying the landscape gene from traditional settlements (Z. Hu, Zheng, Liu, & Liu, 2018; Xiang, Cao, Zhai, & Yi, 2019; X. J. Yang, Fang, & Wang, 2019), heritage protection and inheritance (Wang et al, 2017), tourism development and planning (Li et al, 2017; Shen & Shen, 2020), reconstruction and transformation (B. H. Li, Zhou, Liu, Chen, & Liu, 2018). In addition, studies of the spatial distribution, formation, and evolution of CTVs are being conducted on a national scale (Wu, Chen, Zhou, Liang, & Wang, 2020), in individual provinces (Song, Li, & Zhao, 2018), in geographical regions such as southwest China (Zhao & Tian, 2020), the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region (Tian, 2020), in river or mountain regions (Song et al, 2018; Zhang et al, 2020; Li, 2019), ethnic regions, or on the level of individual villages (Chen et al, 2020), however, not many have investigated the provinces the Yellow River flows through.…”