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The Great Wall of China 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. 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. Wall building—around houses and settlements and along political frontiers—began in China more than 3000 years ago. 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.
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 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.
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. |