Location
across 15 provincial-level regions of northern China
The Great Wall stretches across the desolate r...
The Great Wall stretches across the desolate ridges and gobi of northern China. From the ramparts of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, through the beacon lines of the Qin and Han, to the brick-and-stone bastion of the Ming, building never ceased for more than two thousand years; wall and trench together run over 21,000 kilometers, the largest military defense project in human history. Far more than one wall — ramparts, watchtowers, passes and beacons form a complete defense in depth — it is the physical boundary along which agrarian and nomadic civilizations clashed and mingled for millennia, the heaviest history book ever carved into the earth.
The building of the Great Wall spans almost the whole of Chinese recorded history. The beacon towers of Mount Li, where King You of Western Zhou once fooled his lords with false alarms, may count as the earliest warning system. In the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, Chu raised the Fangcheng rampart and Qi built walls on the northern slopes of Mount Tai, each state fortifying itself along mountains and rivers. In 221 BC Qin united the six states, and General Meng Tian led 300,000 men north against the Xiongnu, "starting at Lintao and reaching Liaodong, stretching more than ten thousand li" — for the first time joining the separate walls into one, giving the structure its name: the Ten-Thousand-Li Long Wall.
The Han dynasty extended the Qin wall west along the Hexi Corridor, building fortresses and beacons beyond Yumen Pass to guard the eastern stretches of the Silk Road; the Northern Wei, Northern Qi and Sui each added their own. The brick-and-stone wall we see today is almost entirely a Ming creation — two centuries of continuous rebuilding turned rammed earth into brick and stone facing, established the Nine Border Garrisons, and raised a line of more than 8,800 kilometers, a feat of engineering organization that still impresses modern engineers.
The Great Wall is a three-dimensional defense system: the main wall follows the ridgelines, its top broad enough for troops to maneuver; crenellations face outward for watch, parapets inward for shelter; every hundred-odd meters a watchtower or battle platform stored arms and housed garrisons; at the strategic points great pass cities — Shanhaiguan, Juyongguan, Jiayuguan — massed troops, each a chokepoint "held by a single man"; and beyond the wall itself, beacons arranged in depth — smoke by day, fire by night — carried military news to the capital, a thousand li away, within hours.
Behind the system stood a vast frontier society. Soldier-farmers tilled the land and garrison families inherited their posts; inside the wall a chain of border towns grew up — Zhangjiakou, Datong, Yulin; beyond the passes, border markets traded the Central Plains' tea and cloth for steppe horses and furs. The Great Wall is less a wall of separation than a shifting zone of contact.
秦时明月汉时关，万里长征人未还。 — "The moon of Qin, the passes of Han; on journeys of ten thousand li, the soldiers march and do not return."—— Wang Changling, "Beyond the Frontier" (Tang dynasty)
The Wall's course roughly follows the 400-millimeter isohyet — precisely the ecological limit of farming civilization. Inside lay the intensively tilled loess and the North China plain; outside, the open grasslands of those who followed water and grass. Two ways of life bred two kinds of social order, which for two thousand years pulled and confronted along this line — and also traded, intermarried and learned from each other: King Wuling of Zhao adopted nomad dress and cavalry archery; Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei moved his capital to Luoyang; and the Qing's "Manchu-Mongol unity" closed the millennium-old frontier through marriage alliance and the league-banner system.
Poets long ago wrote the wall into national memory. The desolation of "the moon of Qin, the passes of Han; on journeys of ten thousand li no soldier returns," the grandeur of "a lone smoke column rises straight from the desert, the long river and the round setting sun" — all grew between ramparts and beacons. The Great Wall thus became the most tangible material footnote to the resilient character of Chinese civilization.
Each celebrated section of the Ming wall has its own character: Jinshanling is dense with watchtowers, its barrier walls and inscribed bricks perfectly preserved, like the spine of a dragon in morning mist; Mutianyu is lush and lovely in every season; Jiankou is holy ground for wild-wall hikers, with the vertiginous stretches of Yingfei Daoyang and the Sky Ladder as steep as anywhere on earth. At the western end, Jiayuguan styles itself "the First and Mightiest Pass under Heaven," its complete barbican system standing between the snow peaks of the Qilian range and the Black Mountains; at the eastern end, Laolongtou at Shanhaiguan runs its stone walls into the sea — the only place the Wall touches the ocean.
"With our flesh and blood, let us build our new Great Wall" — in the fires of the War of Resistance, the wall rose from a defense line into a symbol of national spirit. In 1987 it was inscribed among the first UNESCO World Heritage sites, and in 2007 voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. The claim that astronauts can see it with the naked eye is apocryphal, yet it reflects the world's imagination of this marvel — the only human creation that answers natural mountain ranges at engineering scale.