In combination with earthquake emergency macro investigations on earthquake magnitude from 3-6 in Hubei Province over the past years and earthquake magnitude 8 in Wenchuan, Sichuan Province on may 12, 2008, through the rural earthquake damage exploration in site to find out various damage phenomena of rural buildings, e.g. tiles to be vibrated to fall from the roof of brick-wood structures, various wall-body cracks, profabricated boards to be separated to drop from wall bodies, as well as the other damages like rails, parapets etc., the authors summarize the damage characteristics, analyze the reasons to cause damage, and suggest that several existing problems need to be resolved, such as the load-bearing system of houses is unreasonable, the ring beams and structure columns are not set, tension-joint measures in the wall corners are not taken, and the distance between households is not sized enough. For earth disaster prevention in rural residential areas, three inspirations are concluded: (1) to increase knowledge about rural residential earthquake, improve the farmers ' awareness of earthquake disaster prevention ； (2) to strengthen the rural construction market monitoring and management, as well as construction craftsmen training ； (3) to actively promote earthquake safe rural habitat project implementation.