Period properties get rarer as time goes by, along with the human tragedies. Here's one of the ancient forts at Muzaffarabad before this morning's eathquake.
My son is on the Foreign Office emergency team that's been sent to Islamabad to help with relief operations. He says the casualty toll is just terrible.
Good for him, David. You must be very proud of him. Perhaps, when he gets back, you might ask whether he thinks the modern steel reinforced concrete buildings fared better or worse than the traditional earth wall buildings. Neither, I fear, do very well in eathquakes. Most of the pictures I've seen on the net are of concrete buildings with their horribly tangled reinforcing bars, but there may be a bias in the journalists' pictures as the earth buildings may just disintegrate into piles of earth and not produce recogniseable images for the media. On the other hand, their massive construction and low height may afford some protection.
However, I imagine that there's much more to it than simply the materials that the buildings are made from. The design of the structure and the quality of build must also be very significant factors, I should think.