The Great Wall

When you see this massive structure snaking its way across precipitous, rocky ridges, sometimes even lain across iron beams to bridge windy chasms, you will be amazed by the sheer scale of the undertaking. From the sea in the East to the deserts in the West, the Great Wall stretches its knotted spine. Looking at it, perhaps you will wonder why.

From earliest times, civilisations such as those of the Greeks and Hebrews, enclosed their cities within a perimeter wall. In China during the fifth century BC, the Warring States took this concept one step further and extended their walls to encircle their territories. Then when the Qin Emperor Qinshihuangdi unified China, he joined the walls along the Northern frontier to exclude military refugees and to prevent the incursions of barbaric northern tribes. Thousands of slaves were sacrificed for the completion of this task, and the Great Wall was viewed by the people as a symbol of oppression and tyranny. As each subsequent dynasty saw the expansion or contraction of its territory, so some sort of wall was built to delineate its Northern frontier.

It wasn’t until after the Ming dynasty swept away Mongolian rule in the fifteenth century that the Great Wall was constructed as the regal and systematic fortification that you see today. To understand the motivation for the Ming dynasty’s ambitious project, we must first review what it meant to undergo a Mongolian invasion. When the Horde burst out of the steppes a century earlier, this illiterate, nomadic tribe did not limit itself to the merciless murder, rape and pillage of people and cities. Such was their appetite for conquest that the nomads even burned their mark into vast swathes of cultivated farmland. The traumatic scar that these foreigners left on the Chinese psyche can today be measured in cubic metres according to the dimensions of the huge and incredible Great Wall of China.

The Ming dynasty’s effort to reinforce the wall was not wasted. It was useful in checking the advance of the Manchu invaders for some time. That the Ming finally succumbed was not due to the failure of this fortification, but to the treachery of the commanders defending it.

Time has washed The Great Wall clean of its tyrannical undertones. While some Chinese gloomily regard it as symbolic of China’s insensitivity to new ideas, others prefer to view it as a remarkable, historical achievement. Richard Nixon ably summed up this view:

“This is a Great Wall and only a great people with a great past could have a great wall and such a great people with a such a great wall will surely have a great future. ”