Great Wall (China), popular name for a semi-legendary wall
built to protect China’s northern border in the 3rd century BC, and for
impressive stone and earthen fortifications built along a different northern
border in the 15th and 16th centuries AD, long after the ancient structure had
disappeared. Ruins of the later wall are found today along former border areas
from Bo Hai (a gulf of the Yellow Sea) in the east to Gansu Province in the
west. The Great Wall is visited often near Beijing, at a site called
Ju-yong-guan, and at its eastern and western extremes.
Perhaps China's best known monument—even national symbol—the
Great Wall is not what most people imagine it to be. The existing wall is not
several thousand years old, nor is it, as is widely asserted, visible from
outer space (astronauts confirm this). Indeed, the Great Wall is not even a
single, continuous structure. Rather, it consists of a network of walls and
towers that leaves the frontier open in places.
The Wall of Qin Shihuangdi
Wall building—around houses and settlements and along
political frontiers—began in China more than 3000 years ago. Using the hang-tu
method, pounded layers of earth were alternated with stones and twigs inside
wooden frames to produce durable earthen walls. During the Warring States
period (403-221 BC), before China was unified, feudal states fought for control
of the area constituting most of modern-day China. The states of Qi, Yen, and
Zhao were among those that built earthen ramparts along their frontiers.
The most famous early wall construction is attributed to the
king of the Qin dynasty, who conquered the other states and unified China in
221 BC. Taking the title of Shihuangdi, or First Emperor, Qin Shihuangdi
ordered his military commander Meng Tian to subdue the nomads of the north and
fortify China’s vast frontier. Historians still debate the form these
fortifications took, but records mention the chang cheng (long wall) of
Shihuangdi. No reliable historical accounts indicate the length of the Qin
fortifications or the exact route they followed.
The Ming Walls
Few traces exist today of the ancient wall of Shihuangdi.
Today’s Great Wall, which follows a different route from that of Shihuangdi’s
fortifications, consists of a series of walls built by China’s Ming dynasty
beginning in the late 15th century AD. The Ming, having suffered a military
defeat by the Mongols, had refused to continue to trade with them. The Mongol
tribes of the northern steppe had long depended on China for grain, metal, and
other goods, and China’s refusal led to further conflict between the Ming and
the Mongols, which the Ming proved unable to win. The Ming rulers could not
decide whether to negotiate with the Mongols or attempt to conquer them. As a
compromise, they decided to keep the Mongols out by constructing walls along
China’s northern border. Ultimately, the walls proved ineffective, as the
Mongols were easily able to pass around or break through them during raids. For
this and other reasons, sections of the walls periodically required repair.
Although the first Ming walls were built of earth in the
traditional manner, by the 16th century the work had become much more elaborate
and was done in stone by professional builders paid in silver. Bit by bit, in
response to Mongol challenges, the Ming heavily fortified the region around the
capital at Beijing. Other areas were protected with shorter walls or forts, or
had no defenses at all.
Wall building and repair continued until the Ming dynasty
fell to the Qing dynasty in 1644. By this time, the walls formed an incomplete
and uneven network extending about 2400 km (1500 mi) in length. The eastern end
was at Qinhuangdao, in Hebei Province on the gulf of Bo Hai, while the western
extreme was near Jiayuguan in Gansu Province. The walls spanned mountainous
terrain, conforming to the territory’s numerous peaks and valleys. They
included inner walls and outer walls, and some stretches had watchtowers placed
at regular intervals so that alarm signals could be passed between them in case
of attack. Along the top of the walls was space for soldiers to march. At their
most impressive, around Beijing, the walls measured at least 7.6 m (25 ft) in
height and up to 9 m (30 ft) in width, tapering from the base to the top. These
dimensions varied greatly at other points.
The Myth of the Great
Wall
Neither the Qin wall nor the Ming fortifications were called
the “Great Wall of China” by their Chinese contemporaries. That label, and the
myths that have come with it, appear to have originated in the West. Europeans
who visited China in the 17th and 18th centuries confused the Ming
fortifications with the Qin wall or walls mentioned in dynastic histories. They
also assumed incorrectly that impressive masonry walls like those surrounding
Beijing at the time also extended far to the west. As a result, a description
developed in the West of a vast wall that had secured peace for the civilized
Chinese for thousands of years by excluding the nomads. This idea captured the
imagination of Westerners, and by the late 19th century a visit to the
"Great Wall of China" had become a staple of the Western tourist’s
itinerary.
In the 20th century the Chinese also began to adopt the idea
of the Great Wall, despite the evidence presented by their own historical
records. Revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, who was instrumental in establishing
the Republic of China in 1912, wrote about the wall in glowing terms consistent
with the Western myth. Although some Chinese scholars pointed out Sun’s errors,
they never succeeded in halting the myth’s progress. Patriotic fervor during
World War II (1939-1945) popularized the myth of the Great Wall, and some
renovation was done to the Ming fortifications in the early 1950s. The tide
changed, however, under Communist leader Mao Zedong, who came to power in 1949.
In 1966 Mao launched the political campaign known as the Cultural Revolution,
during which he appealed to the Chinese people to destroy anything associated
with traditional culture. Unappreciated for its historic value, the magnificent
wall surrounding Beijing was torn down for quarrying during this period. Other
wall ruins were also destroyed.
With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao
in 1976, the political climate changed in China, evidenced in part by a rise in
nationalism. In the years that followed, the myth of the Great Wall was
officially propagated throughout the country. In the 1980s the Ming walls began
to undergo extensive renovation at their most visited locations. In the 1990s,
however, historians in both China and the West began to reestablish the actual
history of Chinese wall building and to explore the development of the folklore
surrounding the Ming walls. (Encarta Encyclopedia)
