The Great Wall of China

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The Great Wall of China stretches more than 13,100 miles across the northern part of the country, from its western edge in the Jiayuguan Pass to its eastern edge at the Bohai Gulf. The wall ranges in height from 16 feet to 26 feet and horizontally from 16 feet to 20 feet.

Qin Great Wall

Some rulers in the Zhou Dynasty, during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, had ordered the construction of significant earthen and stone barriers. It wasn't until the Qin Dynasty, and China's first emperor, Shi-huang-di, that construction began on what historians now consider the Great Wall.

In an attempt to keep out invaders, the emperor ordered hundreds of thousands of workers to construct a giant wall across China's northern border. In Shi-huang-di's time, it was more a collection of existing walls, fortified and augmented to include a network of smaller walls that incorporated natural defenses like rivers and high cliffs. Rulers in the Han Dynasty, notably Emperor Wu, Qin Great Wallextended and improve the Great Wall, so that it stretched more than 5,000 miles from Lop Nur in the west to Liaodao in the east. A main impetus for this was to protect trade along the Silk Road.

In the centuries that followed, China descended into a series of internecine struggles and the fortifications of the Great Wall diminished because of inattention. Nomadic armies from the north breached the Great Wall at some significant places. One of the most famous of these breaches was by the Jurchens, who lived under the yoke of the Liao state for many years before rebelling against them. The tribal chieftain Aguda in 1115 declared himself and his people free from Liao influence and resolved to fight to prove it. Aguda, as the leader of the new Jin Dynasty (often called the Great Jin Dynasty, to differentiate it from the earlier Jin Dynasty), and his people fought the Liao for a time and then gained a powerful ally, the Song Dynasty. That alliance was powerful enough to drive the Liao forces to the west, leaving the Jin in control of the north.

Aguda died in 1125, and his successor threw off the alliance with the Song and invaded Song China, storming across the Great Wall in the process. The Jin were initially very successful, taking the Song capital of Kaifeng in 1127. Jin and Song continued to fight for another 14 years, until they agreed to the 1141 Treaty of Shaoxing.

Succeeding the Great Jin and Song were the marauding Mongols, who breached the Great Wall from the north and northwest and, through the efforts of Kublai Khan and a large army, claimed all of China, ruling for nearly a century as the Yuan Dynasty. The Yuan rulers neglected the Great Wall as well, and it wasn't until the Ming Dynasty founder the Hongwu Emperor that workers returned to fortify the great northern barrier.

Full Great Wall

Great Wall watchtower The Ming reconstruction added the more than 25,000 watchtowers that are part of so many images of the Great Wall today. Augmenting the walls themselves were a series of fortresses (some stone and some wood), staffed by soldiers who could drop large stones and other projectiles on enemy forces below and shoot arrows from behind archery windows. Defenders could also move quickly along the walls from one place to another to deal with mobile threats. Cavalry as well as infantry could move in this way; some parts of the fortifications were wide enough for four horses to ride side by side. One common way of communicating with soldiers at distant fortresses was by burning various substances to create a fire that caused smoke, as a signal of impending attack. Another means of preventing attack was a wooden gate that could be raised and lowered, in the latter state preventing an armed forced that breached the wall from advancing very far along it. Not uncommon were armories, barracks, and stables along the inside of the walls.

Great Wall builders

To build the various elements of the wall, workers used a combination of brick, sand, soil, and stone. Historians' conservative estimates are that the amount of materials needed exceeded 100 million tons. These materials came from different places throughout the empire. Workers transported materials by hand carrying, pushing wheelbarrows, and directing carts pulled by horses and oxen. At times, workers used rice paste to hold bricks together.

China's last dynasty, the Qing, made the Great Wall obsolete as a barrier to invasion by extending the borders of the empire north of the fortifications. This came about because the last Ming emperor, Wu Sangui, had opened the Great Wall to what he hoped would be an ally but turned out to be a usurper.

The Chinese Government in the 1980s again made the Great Wall a priority, and reconstruction occurred again. The designation in 1987 of a UNESCO World Heritage site helped in this regard. What exists now, however, is a small part of what was once considered one of the world's grandest construction projects. What remains is still a very popular tourist attraction, visited by millions of people every year.

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