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The Great Wall Of China

The Chinese had two very different ideas about how people should be governed. Intellectuals believed that people were basically good and that rulers needed to be just, fair, and compassionate. Qin Shi Huangdi believed that people were basically untrustworthy, and that, as ruler, he needed to be strict and rigid to control them. As a result, he and the intellectuals were constantly at odds with each other.

But Qin Shi Huangdi had an answer to these disagreements. He made it a crime to think anything except what he thought. Consequently, the intellectuals who disagreed with him were found guilty and sentenced to years of hard labor. That hard labor was working on construction of the Great Wall. People who had never done anything more physically strenuous than read a book found themselves living in freezing, muddy camps. They spent their days hauling dirt and stones simply because they disagreed with Qin Shi Huangdi's philosophy of governing.

This is how the Great Wall got started. It wasn't a friendly community project, with everyone working together, pitching in to help keep out the barbarians. It was forced labor - forced by an authoritarian emperor whom very few people liked - done under enormous protest. Qin Shi Huangdi's method of dealing with dissidents, the people who protested his policies, was a typical example of his style of government. He took only his own advice and got what he wanted-immediately. What he wanted was a Great Wall.

But unlike the Warring States walls, which were hundreds of miles long, Qin Shi Huangdi was demanding a wanli changchen, a "10,000 Li Wall." (A li is a Chinese measurement equal to about 1,760 feet.) Qin Shi Huangdi wanted a wall that was approximately 3,000 miles long. He wanted a wall that, if built in the United States, would stretch from Boston to San Francisco. All of it would be built by humans alone, without the aid of machinery. It was clearly a formidable task. Historians believe that, at most, only a few hundred miles of preexisting Warring States walls were ever incorporated into Qin Shi Huangdi's 10,000 Li Wall. At least 2,500 miles (4,023 km) of new wall were to be built.

Qin Shi Huangdi's reign didn't last very long - only eleven years. But even so, his head military commander, General Meng Tien, managed to get more than 1,500 miles (2,414 km) of the Great Wall built in just seven of those years. Future emperors would add another 1,600 miles (2,575 km) over the next eighteen hundred years.

The design and layout of the wall was so efficient and beautiful, it was followed by all future Chinese emperors. Whenever they built additional sections of the wall or repaired existing ones, they might expand or embellish the original design, but the basic structure was always the same - the one that Qin Shi Huangdi's architects had established.

The early Chinese recorded a lot of information, but they didn't record the name of the original architect. Earlier engineers had figured out how to pound dirt into a hang-tu wall and how to turn it into a tall, thick wall. But the Great Wall was different from other hang-tu walls. The Great Wall was not only longer than any previous Chinese wall, it was also grander. Other walls had been primarily just walls. The Great Wall is a series of towers linked together by sections of wall with a roadway on top.

The Chinese still believed that China was the center of the universe, and the wall needed to reflect that. It needed to be impressive and intimidating. When the Great Wall was first built, the northern tribes wouldn't even graze their ponies within 10 miles of it. Nobody wanted to tangle with a nation that could build such a magnificent structure. Although the wall was built to serve a useful purpose, it was also designed to be beautiful. It might seem odd to think of a wall as beautiful, but the Great Wall was beautiful. A great deal of its beauty came from the way it unfolded across the Chinese landscape.

In less than eleven years, Qin Shi Huangdi managed to force the building of nearly 3,000 miles of wall across China's northern border. But everything had been sacrificed to its construction. Families had been torn apart, one million people had died, and the entire population (what was left of it) was in poverty. Qin Shi Huangdi had become the First Sovereign Emperor of China, but he had done so at great cost. Because he became the first emperor through bullying, deceit, and conquest, he never had the wholehearted backing of the Chinese people. In building the Great Wall, Qin Shi Huangdi managed to anger everyone. By 210 B.C., the Chinese people were exhausted and bankrupt as well.

The next large section of the Great Wall was built between 121 B.C. and 101 B.C., during the reign of Emperor Wu Di. He hoped to subdue again the Xiongnu and establish secure trade routes with the western world. Wu Di followed the original basic design for the wall but significantly expanded it. According to records kept by the Han, Wu Di decreed that the wall should have "a beacon every 5 li, a tower every 10 li, a fort every 30 li, and a castle every 100 li." (If you recall, a li is a Chinese measurement roughly equivalent to 1,760 feet.) He had the Great Wall lengthened in the west by 300 miles and added a chain of watchtowers, not connected by wall sections, that stretched for 70 miles beyond that.

Wu Di's wall (as it came to be called) was built using the hang-tu method of construction. The new sections ran mostly across the western desert, where very little dirt, stone, or wood was available, So workers used sand, the branches of tamarisk (a desert shrub), and reeds. They first made a layer of reeds and tamarisk branches. Then they added a layer of sand mixed with water and tamped everything down. The resulting wall was as hard as concrete.

Workers on Wu Di's section of the Great Wall apparently found better working conditions than those during Qin Shi Huangdi's time. The wall was still built by people who were drafted (taken without their consent from the general population). No written records or folk stories indicate they suffered great hardship. Wu Di's reign began a new way of using the Great Wall. It was still manned by soldiers and used for defensive purposes. But after waging war against the Xiongnu and conquering them, Wu Di set about establishing peaceful relations with the northern nomadic tribes. Peace along the Great Wall secured the way for a flourishing trade route to the rest of the world.

When Wu Di died in 87 B.C., the peace and prosperity he had established along the wall continued. Future emperors in the Han dynasty experienced all sorts of problems (including assassinations), but peaceful trade between China and other nations continued to flourish for the next two hundred years. Even the dreaded Xiongnu became valued trading partners.

But the Xiongnu weren't the only barbarian tribes in the north. By A.D. 200, other tribes had banded together and the wall was under attack again. As these attacks escalated, the Han emperors found it increasingly difficult to keep the barbarians out. China was a large country, with a large bureaucratic government. Because of its size and population, it was always a difficult country for any emperor to manage. And not all emperors were powerful and smart military leaders. For them, trying to run the country while fending off invasions was nearly impossible.

In A.D. 220, the Han dynasty collapsed. With the collapse of the Han, peaceful trade along the Silk Road disappeared. The barbarian tribes overran the wall in several places. By A.D. 300, the Great Wall was actually controlled by northern tribes. In effect, China's northern boundary had shifted southward. The northern barbarians were no longer on the other side of the Great Wall. They were in China.

Rebuilding the Great Wall was no longer just a quick repair job. After nearly one thousand years of general neglect, everything built by Qin Shi Huangdi and succeeding dynasties had deteriorated almost beyond repair. A new Great Wall would have to be built. Emperor Hongwu immediately issued orders to all his generals to begin work on the Great Wall, starting with the towers.

His direct orders were: "At each signal station let the towers be built higher and stronger; within must be laid up food, fuel, medicine, and weapons for four moons [approximately four months]. Beside the tower let a wall be opened, enclosed by a wall as high as the tower itself, presenting the appearance of a double gateway, inner and outer. Be on your guard at all times with anxious care."

Hongwu also demanded that any gate in the wall that carts and horsemen used was to be guarded by one hundred men. Smaller gates, where herdsmen came and went, were to be guarded by ten men. The towers were just the beginning. The entire Great Wall was to be rebuilt.

When we look at the Great Wall of China, most of what we see was constructed during the Ming dynasty. Nearly everything built before that had deteriorated by the time the Ming came to power. Starting with Hongwu, the monk-turned-emperor, succeeding Ming emperors rebuilt and expanded the Great Wall for the next 276 years. The Ming ruled China from 1368 until 1644, and the Great Wall became a continuous Ming dynasty project. By the time the Ming were through, the Great Wall stretched for more than 4,000 miles.

Much of the new Great Wall, built during the Ming dynasty, is actually a little bit south of the Great Wall constructed from the Qin through Han dynasties. So little remained of the Qin and Han dynasties' walls, many people assumed that the Great Wall didn't exist before the Ming. As the Great Wall wound across China's northern border, the Ming incorporated the earlier constructions where they could, but more often they had to build an entirely new wall.

Each Ming emperor rebuilt and extended the wall. The last powerful Ming emperor, Wanli, did so much wall building that some in future generations assumed that the entire wall had been built by him. Wanli ruled China from 1572 until his death in 1620. It was Wanli, along with Hong Zhi, a Ming emperor before him, who created the magnificent towers, gates, and mighty stone walls we still see.

The three main components of the Ming Great Wall are gates, towers, and walls. All had existed in previous walls, but the Ming builders refined them and made them more uniform. The strongest fortifications were built at gates in the wall. The largest gates, where troops passed through, were built at places of military importance. Because these openings were large, they should have been the easiest places to attack. The Ming fortified each gate so heavily, though, that they were usually the most difficult places for any enemy to try to break through.

Signal towers went by many names: beacons, beacon terraces, kiosks, or smoke mounds. As in the past, the lower part of a tower was used for storage and housing, the upper part for lookouts and signaling. Walls linked the towers. Ming builders followed the basic wall plan developed by Qin Shi Huangdi. The walls were about 21 feet (6.4 m) thick at the base, tapering to 19 feet at the top. In most places, they were about 26 feet tall. But unlike the Qin and Han dynasties' walls, the Ming wall was completely covered in brick or stone.

Wanli was the last emperor to work on the Great Wall of China. He extended the wall to its greatest lengths and fortified it more than any other emperor. Yet Wanli also started the Great Wall on its decline. Wanli, the thirteenth Ming emperor, was the last powerful emperor of the Ming dynasty. During Wanli's rule, China enjoyed peace and military security, It also traded with most of Europe. All three of these things - peace, security, and trade - were possible because of the Great Wall. When the Ming dynasty - and the Great Wall - declined, so did peace and prosperity.

Wanli came to power in 1572 and did most of his wall building during the first twenty years of his reign. He started off by completing projects begun by Emperor Hongwu and continued to expand and fortify the Great Wall. In short, he was acting the way all Ming emperors before him did: Build more wall, add more soldiers. Then, sometime around 1590, Wanli's friend and most trusted adviser, Zhang Zhu Zheng, died. Not until his death did it become apparent just how heavily Wanli had relied upon his adviser's judgment and just how instrumental Zhang Zhu Zheng had been in rebuilding the Great Wall and running China. Without Zhang Zhu Zheng, Wanli turned out to be a terrible ruler.

He began to act very oddly. He lost all interest in governing China, let alone expanding or maintaining the Great Wall. He secluded himself inside his palace and refused to meet with any of his advisers. He grew fearful of comets, eclipses, sudden floods, and droughts. He also became wildly extravagant, spending more than nine million ounces of silver on building royal palaces. He spent even more than that on gifts for his friends and relatives.

By 1599 Wanli had spent so much money, China was on the verge of economic collapse. Canal and farming projects were abandoned, and the construction of official buildings came to a halt. Soldiers and government workers weren't paid, so they drifted away from their jobs. China's whole government structure fell apart. The construction of the Great Wall also suffered. There was no money to pay soldiers to guard the wall or to pay for needed repairs and expansion.

By the time Wanli died in 1620, China was in a disastrous mess. For more than twenty years, he had refused to govern China and had spent the money collected in taxes on himself. Because he was the emperor, no one dared question his right to do this. If he had stepped aside and let someone else govern, China might have been better off. But, although he had no interest in running the government himself, he didn't name a successor. Consequently, all of China suffered.

Three more Ming emperors followed Wanli, but none were strong rulers, and none were able to reverse China's decline. Perhaps more importantly, none of them had any money to expand and fortify the Great Wall. Brick by brick, the wall crumbled. Because it was no longer staffed with soldiers, northern tribes overran parts of it. In 1644 another northern group, the Manchu, broke through the wall and took control of China.

Built to save China, the Great Wall no longer has any military importance - the development of missiles and satellite technology saw to that. But in 1972, China reversed its policy of isolation and opened its doors again to the rest of the world. Since the mid-1980s, the Great Wall has been China's main tourist attraction, generating millions of dollars of revenue for China every year. The Chinese people have shown a renewed sense of pride in this amazing structure built by their ancestors.

The Great Wall reflects the history of China in its bricks and dirt. It tells the stories of emperors and dynasties, of triumphs and defeat, of treachery and death. The Great Wall has been the means for both the closing and the opening of China to trade and contact with the outside world. Truly one of the greatest feats of building, the Great Wall illustrates for the world the long saga of one of the largest and oldest nations on earth.

Lesley A. DuTemple. . Lerner Publications Company, Minneapolis, MN. 2003.

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