What Was the Great Wall of China For? Walls, Frontiers and a Myth About the Moon
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There is no single Great Wall. There are walls of rammed earth from the third century BC, walls of brick and stone from the sixteenth, and thousands of kilometres of ditches, beacon towers and forts in between, built by a dozen dynasties along a frontier that moved as the balance between China and the peoples of the steppe moved. The stone wall that tourists climb near Beijing is the last and most impressive version, built by the Ming, and the reasons for it and for the earlier ones say more about what China feared than about what it kept out.
The first walls
The states of the Warring States period, before 221 BC, built walls against each other and against the nomads to their north, and when the king of Qin united them into the first Chinese empire he joined and extended the northern ones. His wall was rammed earth, built by conscripted labour and convicts under a general who was later ordered to kill himself, and the legend that it cost a million lives and that the dead were buried in it is older than the Han dynasty; a folk tale of a widow whose tears made the wall collapse to reveal her husband's bones is still told. Almost nothing of the Qin wall survives above ground. The Han dynasty that followed extended the line far to the west along the Silk Road, with watchtowers whose wooden records, recovered from the desert, describe garrison life in detail: rations, roll calls, the beacons of smoke by day and fire by night that passed a warning along hundreds of kilometres in hours.
The Ming wall
The wall of the postcards was built from the 1470s to the 1640s, after the Ming dynasty had driven out the Mongols and then failed to conquer them. Following a debate at court between those who wanted to attack the steppe and those who wanted to trade with it, the Ming chose a third option, to wall it off, and spent two centuries doing so with the resources of the richest state in the world. The result ran for some 8,850 kilometres from the sea at Shanhaiguan to the desert at Jiayuguan, faced in brick and stone where the ground allowed and earth where it did not, with towers every few hundred metres, garrisons, barracks and roads. Its features:
- •Multiple lines: around Beijing the wall doubles and triples, and passes are defended by walls within walls
- •Watchtowers with crenellations, loopholes and beacon platforms, built for signalling as much as defence
- •A walkway on top wide enough for five horsemen, so troops could be moved along the line
- •Garrison towns behind it, and the Nine Frontier Commands that administered nearly a million soldiers at the peak
- •Bricks fired in kilns near the site, mortar bound with sticky rice, and stones carried up by hand
What it was for
The wall was not meant to stop an army. A determined force could always cross it somewhere, and the Mongols did, reaching the gates of Beijing in 1550. It was meant to make raiding unprofitable: a war party that got across could not get back quickly with cattle and captives, and the towers meant it was seen. It controlled movement in both directions, channelling trade through gates where it could be taxed and stopping Chinese subjects from leaving. It marked, in the most permanent way possible, the line between the settled and the nomadic, which the Chinese state regarded as the line between civilisation and its opposite. And it was a political statement by a dynasty that could not defeat its enemy and would not deal with it, and that could afford stone.
What it did
By the measure that mattered, the Ming wall failed. In 1644 the Manchus, the people the northern section was built against, came through the pass at Shanhaiguan, whose commander opened the gate to them to help suppress a peasant rebellion that had taken Beijing, and they ruled China for the next 268 years as the Qing dynasty. The Qing, whose empire included Mongolia, had no use for a wall in the middle of it and let it decay; villagers took the bricks for houses and pigsties, and a third of the Ming wall has disappeared. The earlier walls had done better at their more modest job, and the Han towers in the far west protected the Silk Road for centuries. Historians now tend to see all the walls as one part of a frontier policy that also used trade, tribute, diplomacy and marriage, and that worked when the state was strong and failed when it was weak, whether or not the wall was there.
The myths
The wall cannot be seen from the Moon, or from low orbit with the naked eye; it is a few metres wide and the colour of the ground, and astronauts including China's first, Yang Liwei, have said so. The claim appears in a 1932 cartoon strip and predates spaceflight. It is not one continuous structure and never was. It was not called the Great Wall by the Chinese until Western visitors named it so in the nineteenth century, and the current name, the Long Wall of Ten Thousand Li, means only a very long wall. And for most of its history it was regarded in China not as a wonder but as a symbol of tyranny and waste, the widow's tears and the buried dead; it became a national emblem in the twentieth century, when Sun Yat-sen and then Mao adopted it, and a song written in 1935 that calls on the people to build a new Great Wall with their flesh and blood is the national anthem.
The takeaway
The Great Wall is a series of frontier walls built by Chinese dynasties over two thousand years, from the rammed earth of the Qin and Han to the brick and stone of the Ming, meant less to stop armies than to make raids unprofitable, to control and tax movement and to mark the edge of the settled world. The Ming wall was breached by treachery in 1644 and left to decay by the dynasty that came through it; it cannot be seen from space, was never one wall, and became a symbol of the nation only in the last century.