Wall Stories

Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng

If the Wall is big, the myths are bigger, but the idea of a single, continuous, extremely long, picture-perfect, crenellated wall that kept out marauding barbarian hordes has a grip on the imagination of the travelling public that the Chinese have no intention at all of correcting. As Lord Macartney put it more than 200 years ago, ‘All their writings agree that this wall was built above two hundred years before the Christian era,’ and no Chinese publication or tour guide is going to disabuse you today.

The length of the Great Wall is, however, almost impossible to calculate. Figures from 2,400km to 5,000km are quoted for the Míng Wall alone, which runs from Shān Hǎi Guān (山海关) in the east (although another earthen section runs up to the border with North Korea) to Jiāyù Guān (嘉峪关) in the west. The higher estimate is perhaps due to an overly literal translation of Wàn Lǐ Cháng Chéng, ‘10,000 Lǐ Long Wall’, where a lǐ is about ½km, although wàn is often just a Chinese way of saying ‘rather a lot’. In some areas there are two or three overlapping walls, in other areas gaps. Long defensive spurs spread out from the main route, and many sections lie separate and disconnected, often at some considerable distance.

Some Great Wall tickets carry text claiming a total length of 6000km, others put the figure at more than 7500km. An ‘official’ figure of 8850km for the whole Wall, based on unreliable historical sources, was published in 2009, but in 2012, just after the death of the official responsible, this was suddenly raised to the remarkably precise 21,196.18km — a figure greeted with a mixture of mockery and political consternation. As the Korea JoongAng Daily remarked on 8 June 2012:

China increasingly is using history to diminish neighboring countries on the pretext of rediscovering its glorious past. But historians in neighboring countries such as Korea claim it’s inventing a greater past.

One story about the Wall endlessly repeated is that it is the only human construction visible from the moon. This was once perpetuated in text on some Great Wall tickets, although the Wall had been demoted to one of two (the other supposedly a Dutch dyke). As the Wall is only 6m wide at best, this would be similar to seeing a thread lying in the street from the top of the Empire State Building, and might lead you to wonder why considerably wider and electrically lit highways cannot be seen, too.

Unsurprisingly, none of the lunar astronauts commented on seeing it, and when in 2003 China’s first astronaut Yáng Lìwěi (杨利伟) made it into orbit he had to admit he couldn’t see it even from there. Needless to say, anyone with decent binoculars or a telescope, the weather in their favour, and the knowledge of exactly where to look could see the Wall from Yáng’s orbit of around 200km to 350km above the planet or even from the International Space Station’s orbit at around 400km. But with the assistance of lenses the Wall would be just one of innumerable visible man-made objects.

Before the mid-to-late Míng the majority of the many defensive walls were simply made of rammed earth. They required continuous maintenance lest natural erosion make them insignificant within two or three generations or vanish altogether. Those who argue that Marco Polo never visited China point out that although Polo’s journeys both to and around China must many times have taken him past sections of Wall, he never mentions it once. One reason may be that there had been little defensive wall building during a long period before his arrival, and there was simply no Great Wall to see.

Many others travelling before and after Polo — papal emissaries, missionaries, and traders — fail to mention it either, and even in Chinese historical documents there are only occasional references to ‘long walls’, some of only a few tens of kilometres rather than a single long or great wall, and an assortment of terms for ‘barrier’, ‘rampart’, or ‘frontier’ are all much more common. Most of what you’ll see today was originally built in the time of the Jiājìng (r. 1522–1566), Lóngqìng (1567–1572), and particularly Wànlì emperors (1573–1620), so much so that some thought the Wall, the Wàn Lǐ Cháng Chéng, was named for him, despite the difference in tones. The officially open parts on which you walk were substantially rebuilt no more than 50 years ago and may be a complete reconstruction ten to 15 years old or even less. Others not yet officially open but increasingly popular are threatened with the same destructive ‘conservation’.

It was only in modern times that the Chinese began to think of the Wall the way that Westerners do. The current presentation of it is merely, as with the idea of the ‘Silk Road’ (the late-19th-century invention of a German geographer) and the drama of the Yángzǐ River (that faded a century ago, not with the recent construction of the Three Gorges Dam), the Chinese selling back to foreigners an idea of their own coining, for national prestige and substantial profit.

This may have begun with the accounts of 17th-century Jesuits keen to impress their supporters at home and to justify the expense of their mission, hyping China’s defensive walls in the process. ‘Great Wall’ is the foreign name: Cháng Chéng means ‘Long Wall’, and even the idea of visibility from space was almost certainly of foreign origin.

Nor was the Wall even effective at its job. Nomadism becomes dependent on settled societies for the products it cannot easily produce for itself, such as metal stirrups, and needs to trade the meat, dairy products, leather, and textiles it can produce. Shut out of settled society, nomads have little choice but to attack, and the Chinese desire to view all societies other than their own as subsidiary, barbarian, and supplicant to the glory of Chinese culture forced them into an arms race which, for all their resources, they could only lose. For brief periods, and particularly for part of the more outward-looking Táng dynasty (618–907), the Chinese traded with mounted forces to their north and the peace was kept cheaply.

The Great Míng Empire’s decision to close itself off from outsiders altogether was extremely expensive — that era’s equivalent of a ‘Star Wars’ missile shield. The overlapping layers of the Wall it constructed were often effective tactically, successfully repulsing individual attacks, but were hopeless strategically, since the highly mobile nomads just went around the end of stretches of wall, found holes where it had not been properly maintained, outflanked the garrisons at key points, or simply bribed their way in.

The Chinese needed constantly to upgrade and to man an increasingly long frontier, while the Mongols needed merely to use their existing equipment — their horses — to move to another point of attack. As one Chinese tactician put it, ‘If there is one weak point and then one hundred strong points, the whole is weak.’ Asymmetric warfare dates to long before the modern examples of individual suicide bombers finding ways round multi-billion-dollar defence systems.

The Mongols wanted trade, and the Míng spent vast sums excluding them. Even one of the major advocators of wall-building admitted in the 16th century that permitting trade was the only long-term solution, but intrigues in the insular court ensured that any trading was short-lived.

In 1549 the Mongols fired a message-bearing arrow into a Chinese general’s camp saying that if no trade relations were forthcoming then they would attack Běijīng. So ineffective was the Wall that on 30 September the following year, despite this advance notice, Mongol leader Altan Khan led 700 of his mounted tribesmen up to the Āndìng Mén and banged on the gates.

All that interested the Mongolian and his early tour group was shopping, and he spent three days pillaging the Běijīng suburbs for the metal goods and ceramics he needed, along with grains and beans to feed his starving people.

From atop the city walls Chinese nobles could no doubt watch columns of smoke rising from their estates, and yet after this event wall-building intensified to the point at which construction and maintenance costs rose to as much as three quarters of the Míng budget, contributing to the already tottering dynasty’s final collapse in 1644. The Wall didn’t save the Míng empire; it destroyed it.

Yet the Chinese advisers to the Qīng and the by-then heavily Sinicised Manchu emperors themselves viewed the antics of the Western Ocean barbarians and their requests for trade in just the same way 150 years later. Failing, as ever, to learn from experience, and secure in the sense of their own superiority, they found trade forced on them by military might.

Nevertheless, the myth of the Wall’s impregnability had a grip on the Chinese imagination that lasted well into the 20th century. David Kidd describes a conversation with his Manchu wife’s aunt:

‘I bought that radio in 1937 to hear the hour-by-hour news of the Japanese invasion,’ she might say, indicating a cabinet against the wall, ‘and I haven’t turned it on since. When the Japanese came south from Manchuria, they entered China through the gate in the Great Wall at Shanhaikwan… If we had closed that gate, the Japanese could never have got into China.’

David Kidd, Peking Story, London, 1996

See an introduction to The Great Wall for details of ten Great Wall sites near Běijīng. See links below for other sights in Běijīng’s suburbs and beyond, or go to the Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing (home page).

For moderated on-line discussion of China travel, see The Oriental-List.