The Great Wall

Sep 29, 2018
3 min read

How I came across this book: The British Museum

Favorite Line from the book:

It seems that the First Emperor’s Great Wall, if we are talking about one structure built on his orders, is a figment of later imagination, made to seem solid by confusion with later and earlier walls, and given spurious historical roots by Sima Qian’s vague words.

The wall did many things: it proclaimed the frontier, it employed thousands, it prevented defections, it displayed the might of the emperor. What it could not do on its own was keep out the barbarians. Nothing would while they still existed.

The great wall is not one continuous wall. It is not an ‘it’ as there are many walls built at different time periods. The wall cannot be seen from the space. The wall was almost always non-existent when Mongols wanted to raid into China and vice versa. The wall was definitely not meant to hold back alien creatures as shown in Matt Damon’s movie though it made for good special effects. John Man busts all the myths surrounding the wall in this epic biography of the great wall, and in the process, traces the history of China over the last two thousand years.

Chinese civilization has the longest documented history dating back to four millenniums. Yet, it can be difficult to define where the folklore and mythologies get mixed with the truth. Though history itself is subjective as it is written by the winners. One such famous myth revolves around the tears of Meng Jiangnu, a beautiful girl who was born out of fruit. Her husband was killed and buried near the great wall by the first emperor (221- 206 BC). Three years later, when Meng Jiangnu found out about the death of her husband, she hit her head against the great wall in grief. A 20-kilometer segment of the wall collapsed. Meng Jiangnu’s story has metamorphosed into different versions over the course of a millennium to suit the Chinese culture for the appropriate era. Chinese have held her as a symbol of revolution, counter-revolution, war as well as peace.

From the Shang to the Ming dynasty, China has seen more than twenty different dynasties. The history of the great wall is closely associated with these dynasties. The story of the wall seemed to have started with the first emperor who tried to create a boundary along the northern border of China. The wall was mostly made of the earth rather than stone during that period. Later generations of kingdoms such as the Han, Tang, and Song dynasty extended the wall in both directions. It was only during the 14 – 16th century the wall took its current epic stone form when the Ming dynasty built it to defend themselves from the constant raids of the Mongols. On the other hand, the Mongols were just trying to survive. They wanted to trade, but the Chinese considered it inferior to trade with the Mongols (barbarians as per the Chinese). Chinese agreed to give them gifts (silk, gold, silver, horses, and princess) but they were never keen to trade. As soon as the gifts downpour went down, the raids went up. Only when the Manchus came into power in 1644 did the attacks stop. Manchus were smart enough to understand the importance of trade with the Mongols.

The great wall never seemed to be a barrier or border for the strong horses on either side – the Chinese or the Mongols. Just like Meng Jiangnu’s tears, the great wall seemed to hold different value at different times – revolution, counter-revolution, war as well as peace. As John Man notes, today the wall is attached to many products, appears on stamps, it is a broadband network, a UNESCO world heritage site, and many more. Sun Tzu in his book ‘the art of war’ wrote that diplomacy achieves the best victories without fighting any wars. If the Chinese used some diplomacy in the form of trade, then maybe they did not need the wall. It is easier to argue and counter argue in retrospect, but we can definitely learn from the Chinese history and judge for ourselves when we need a ‘Wall’ and when we don’t.