Greatwall of China

Now if you have traveled to China for a vacation holiday or on a business trip, people will inevitably ask you whether you have visited The Great Wall of China? Why is this tourist attraction in China so attractive? It is because if you have not gone sightseeing at the Great Wall of China, then your China vacation is missing out a great deal. Here is why.

There are many watch towers, which were actually barracks for soldiers and warehouses for arms and were spaced close enough that soldiers from one barracks could quickly come to the aid of a besieged group at another watchtower.

I don’t know how long their tours of duty lasted, but it must have played hob with family life. I sometimes wonder how China got to be so overpopulated with all the famines, wars, and military tours of duty.

The Great Wall has crenellations as are found in European castle walls. Soldiers could survey the countryside through them, then shoot at invaders through the embrasures below.

A communications system grew up with signal towers spreading across the countryside. Fuel was stored—animal dung being a favorite because it smokes like crazy—to be lit when an enemy was approaching. Seeing the smoke and fire, the watchman at the next signal tower then lit his dung heap and so on, passing the word to the city and villages in the enemy’s path. This was quick and effective in the days before radio, telephones, and internet. Ingenious.

Reflecting the multi-culturalism of early China, the section of wall at Juyong Pass (30 miles from downtown Beijing) has a marble platform with bas-relief sculptures of the four Heavenly Kings, with Buddhist incantations in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongolian, Uygur, Han, and Xixia. Niches in the wall contain 2,000 Buddhist sculptures. Genghis Khan fought a major battle in this area, and I’d like to see it. Next trip, maybe.

Much of the roadway on top of the wall is now overgrown with bushes and even trees making passage difficult. The Bedaling section is nicely restored and free of vegetation, however, awaiting visitors. A couple of men in our group hiked to the end of the restoration and said it ended abruptly in a drop-off. I’ll take their word for it.

Scott, ever the champion of the people (See China: Tiananmen Square) told us the wall was built using clay and rice as a binder. If you’ve ever clogged your kitchen sink drain by washing out your rice pot, you know how gummy rice can be. Scott said the wall was built at great cost to human life at a time when rice was scarce and many peasants were starving.

We asked about the rumor we’d heard that bodies of workmen were entombed in the wall. He said, “Of course. The workmen were overworked and underfed and thousands died. What were they going to do with the bodies? It’s logical they would become part of the structure.” It gave us an eerie feeling as we gazed at the magnificent wall. I was glad we were there in the daytime.

In the days before modern weapons, the wall did a good job of defending China. I’d heard that the enemy just did an end run around it, but that’s not entirely true . According to the website of Travel China Guide, China fell to the Mongols due to weak government and poverty of the peasants.

Then again, in 1644 AD, the Manchus crossed the wall by convincing (threats? bribes?) a Chinese guard to open the gates of Shanhai Pass. Legend has it that it took three whole days for the Manchu army to enter. And that was the end of the Ming Dynasty.

Neither the Qin wall nor the Ming fortifications were called the “Great Wall of China” by their Chinese contemporaries. That label, and the myths that have come with it, appear to have originated in the West. Europeans who visited China in the 17th and 18th centuries confused the Ming fortifications with the Qin wall or walls mentioned in dynastic histories. They also assumed incorrectly that impressive masonry walls like those surrounding Beijing at the time also extended far to the west. As a result, a description developed in the West of a vast wall that had secured peace for the civilized Chinese for thousands of years by excluding the nomads. This idea captured the imagination of Westerners, and by the late 19th century a visit to the ‘Great Wall of China’ had become a staple of the Western tourist’s itinerary.

In the 20th century the Chinese also began to adopt the idea of the Great Wall, despite the evidence presented by their own historical records. Revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, who was instrumental in establishing the Republic of China in 1912, wrote about the wall in glowing terms consistent with the Western myth. Although some Chinese scholars pointed out Sun’s errors, they never succeeded in halting the myth’s progress. Patriotic fervor during World War II (1939-1945) popularized the myth of the Great Wall, and some renovation was done to the Ming fortifications in the early 1950s. The tide changed, however, under Communist leader Mao Zedong, who came to power in 1949. In 1966 Mao launched the political campaign known as the Cultural Revolution, during which he appealed to the Chinese people to destroy anything associated with traditional culture. Unappreciated for its historic value, the magnificent wall surrounding Beijing was torn down for quarrying during this period. Other wall ruins were also destroyed.

With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao in 1976, the political climate changed in China, evidenced in part by a rise in nationalism. In the years that followed, the myth of the Great Wall was officially propagated throughout the country. In the 1980s the Ming walls began to undergo extensive renovation at their most visited locations. In the 1990s, however, historians in both China and the West began to reestablish the actual history of Chinese wall building and to explore the development of the folklore surrounding the Ming walls.

Great Wall (China), popular name for a semi-legendary wall built to protect China’s northern border in the 3rd century bc, and for impressive stone and earthen fortifications built along a different northern border in the 15th and 16th centuries ad, long after the ancient structure had mostly disappeared. Ruins of the later wall are found today along former border areas from Bo Hai (a gulf of the Yellow Sea) in the east to Gansu Province in the west. The Great Wall is visited often near Beijing, at a site called Ju-yong-guan, and at its eastern and western extremes.

Ordinarily I might have paused to catch my breath, but hiking up to the Great Wall of China is never an ordinary affair. Its silhouetted battlements running along the skyline spur me on. Sweating, straining, I’m injected with new enthusiasm when I spot bricks from the wall lying at the side of the rocky path, weighing perhaps 30 pounds each. I press on, doubtless in the footsteps of the army of builders who carried and levered the wall up—brick by brick, block by block—from 1,200 feet below. Then, instead of getting lighter as expected, the horizon darkens: A 20-foot-high barrier of light gray stone confronts me, its massive blocks laid in straight courses, perfectly interlocking. More than 2,000 pounds each, I estimate, and nine courses high. Insurmountable. An archway gives me the only access into this stronghold, and I climb steps onto the top of the wall, a stone highway stretching into the distance. From here I get a view down to the valley, my route, the builders’ route. I wonder how the builders transported all the material, for I’m atop a 2,600-foot-highridge, a formidable thing. Then nature paints over that logistical enigma with a pale pink sunlight, which illuminates a scene virtually unchanged for 430 years. My map-reading has been good: I am on a section of the “wild wall,” where nothing modern deforms the vista, not a power line or a road; there is only this ancient road of sorts, the Great Wall of China.

Quarried and baked from the mountains and earth that it crosses, rising along the line where traditional Chinese ways of life clashed against the free, roving ways of northern nomads, the Great Wall here complements nature, even enhances it. Before and behind me the glowing ramparts dominate the landscape for miles around. I know by the symbol on my map that the wall comes from where the sun rises and goes to where it sets.

I am standing all alone, high up on the Great Wall, with the whole day before me to walk along my very own section of the world’s most spectacular open-air museum. I need no other vantage point to know the wall’s true greatness: It is far more than history, far more than a landmark—it is part of the very geography of China, of Asia, of the world, and even beyond.
The Great Wall is probably China’s best-known monument and one of its most popular tourist destinations. In 1987 it was designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The Great Wall is not a single, continuous structure. Rather, it consists of a network of walls and towers that leaves the frontier open in places. Estimates of the total length of the monument vary, depending on which sections are included and how they are measured. The Great Wall is about 2,400 km (about 1,500 mi) long, according to conservative estimates. Other estimates cite a length of 6,400 km (4,000 mi), or even longer. Some long-standing myths about the wall have been dispelled in recent decades. The existing wall is not several thousand years old, nor is it, as has been widely asserted, visible with the naked eye from outer space. (Astronauts have confirmed this. However, some of the wall is discernible in special radar images taken by satellites.)

Contrary to popular imagination and Chinese tourist propaganda, the Great Wall of China did not exist continuously for 2,000 years, was never a single line of fortifications, and even failed to keep out invaders. English-speakers have been able to know this since Arthur Waldron’s The Great Wall of China: from history to myth, but as specialists ruefully acknowledge, it will take a blockbuster of Wild Swans proportions before such “new” information becomes embedded as popular wisdom. The Great Wall may be that blockbuster.

The Great Wall we see today is a post-Mao restoration of a hugely expensive defence system built chiefly in the 16th century under the Ming dynasty. Julia Lovell places this in the context of 3,000 years of varied Chinese frontier defences against the northern nomads of the inner Asian steppes. In a somewhat disjointed narrative (interspersed with capsule explanations of concepts such as the examination system), we see how Chinese policy alternated between defence and aggression, with walled fortifications, usually in discontinuous sections and often more than one layer deep, frequently playing a part in both. Walls built to reinforce the mountain passes leading into the North China plain tended to be defensive, as in the Ming. Those built far out in the steppe may have been bases for colonial occupation, as in the fourth century BC, before there even was a Chinese empire.

Lovell attempts to do more than trace the changing functions of frontier walls. She wants to use the variety of attitudes towards wall-building as a way of exploring the shifting relationship of Chinese governments to the outside world.

This is a story of change and variety exciting enough not to need the sensationalist treatment (or the facetious tone) which the author sometimes adopts. It is becoming recognised that it is no longer enough to treat China as a monolith: unchanging, exotic, shockingly different. In the last generation, the isolationism of the Mao years has given way to an accelerating opening of markets and popular culture – though not of politics – to outside influences and foreign imports.

In keeping with this dramatic shift, recent popular works have often rejected the idea of China as a “hermit kingdom” and instead emphasised the tendencies towards openness in past dynasties. Joanna Waley-Cohen’s Sextants of Beijing traces the adoption of Jesuit and other ideas in the 18th century, while Valerie Hansen’s Open Empire draws attention to an even wider range of earlier borrowings, not least Buddhism. (Less reputable are the claims of Gavin Menzies about Chinese cartography in 1421).

Lovell is less optimistic. Turning away from technology and culture to politics at the highest level, she finds openness only by treating Chinese imperial expansionism as a twisted form of internationalism. Her chief concern is with the efforts of successive dynasties to close out the threat posed by nomadic northerners. Here, Lovell’s fascinating description of the variety of approaches to wall-building becomes mired in a set of persistent stereotypes that specialists have been working to debunk for a decade or more.

To pursue her wider goal of examining the roots of the modern Chinese mindset, Lovell feels it necessary to maintain a sharp historical distinction between Chinese and non-Chinese. Since wall-building is her route into the twists and turns of Chinese thinking over three millennia, she argues that walls must be a uniquely Chinese solution to dealing with the neighbours.

How, then, to explain why many non-Chinese regimes who ruled parts or all of North China and the southern steppe – notably the Jin dynasty, founded by the semi-nomadic Jurchen of Manchuria – also built walls? Why, by first becoming “sinicised” into honorary Chinese, of course. And how do you know that someone has become sinicised? Because they use Chinese methods, such as wall-building.

The circularity of this outdated analysis obviates what could have been a much more interesting discussion of the foreign-relations complexities of China’s “Middle Period” – roughly the 10th to the 14th centuries. Why, for instance, did the (non-Chinese) Jin build walls against their northern neighbours in the 12th century when their southern neighbours, the long-lasting (Chinese) Song dynasty, made little use of “long walls” despite being on the defensive against determined attack from the steppe?

Explaining Jin wall-building under the rubric of “sinicisation” undercuts Lovell’s own persuasive thesis that walls were used differently – or not at all – by defensive and expansionist rulers. It is a pity that in debunking one central myth about China for what is likely to be a large popular audience, the book introduces other canards that will need to be demolished in their turn.

So is it really a question of China against the world? Certainly, Lovell’s focus is on walls as physical manifestations of antagonism between rapacious barbarians and agricultural Chinese, who are mostly on the defensive. But this leaves little space to consider non-military interactions, such as the trade relations which nomads frequently sought from China’s dynasties, which may have kept the peace when granted.

Nor is there room to address the significance of Lovell’s observation that Chinese warlords could sometimes become “more aggressive, opportunistic and risk-taking even than the nomads themselves.” Issues like these demand explanations that move beyond an essentialist view of cultural differences into areas such as economics and realpolitik – not just at a governmental level but also in a wide range of borderland localities.

One thing that Lovell’s account shows without doubt is that Chinese imperial courts were rarely in full control of their northern frontiers, just as today’s Chinese authorities cannot exercise total command of the internet (nor, indeed, of migration across the Siberian and Xinjiang borders). Then, as now, government intentions were frequently disrupted, diverted or subverted by local realities, which in some cases became the drivers of events at state level.

As China comes into wider and deeper contact with the rest of the world, it is not only government thinking on international relations that we must understand, but also the range of attitudes held by Chinese individuals in their interactions with foreigners. As Lovell says, the devil is in the detail, but therein also lies the better understanding that we so urgently need.

When I set out to experience China for six days earlier this year, I hoped to get a flavor of local culture, explore off the beaten path and absorb ancient dynasty landmarks. What I didn’t expect was to become befriended so quickly and graciously.

During the 14-hour flight from Chicago to Beijing, my husband and I were introduced to a couple through the stewardess we met en route. Rubin and Strawberry were natives of Beijing, but also live as U.S. citizens in their homes in Chicago and Los Angeles. After visiting with us a short time, they took it upon themselves to escort us to historical destinations to ensure we had the best possible experience during our two short days in Beijing.

Day One: The Great Wall. Historians say construction and rebuilding occurred between 700 B.C. and the 1600s, during the Qin and Ming dynasties. Made of compacted earth, straw, sand and brick, estimates of the combined length of all of its structures range up to 12,400 miles.

Millions labored on the wall; at one time, a fifth of the working population was involved. Many perished, and remains have been discovered.

Our hike was steep, and at times the width of the wall accommodated 10 native and foreign tourists abreast. We peered through lookout towers and admired the mountainous views, while marveling at the mammoth undertaking of those who toiled and died for the defense of their land.

Second Adventure: The Ming Tombs. Thirteen of the 16 Ming emperors ordered the construction of hidden burials, more than 80 feet below ground level. The tombs’ location in the narrow valley north of Changping reflects principles of feng shui, the balance and harmony of man and nature, combining the elements of wind, earth and water.

Day Two: As the sun rose, we walked to Tiananmen Square to observe a flag-raising ceremony conducted by the Chinese military. We ended our time in Beijing by touring the Forbidden City, a nearly 250-acre complex of 800-plus buildings that housed the Ming and Qing emperors, their concubines and governmental officials.

The buildings are adorned with symbolic details, colors of royalty, beautiful gardens and large courtyards. The Forbidden City remains encircled by a 30-foot wall and a moat almost 20 feet deep.

Our new friends also treated us to a traditional Chinese body and foot massage. The cost of this experience is a fraction of what it would be in the United States.

With our hosts, we devoured the famously prepared Peking duck. The main course is filleted in the presence of the dinner party. The crispy bites of meat were moist and served with a slender cake, hoisin sauce and spring onions.

Days Three Through Six: We flew to Shanghai, where the blue skies and sunny days of Beijing were replaced by gray, looming smog, drizzle and hundreds of high-rise buildings. Shanghai, a metropolitan home to more than 20 million, is evidence of a booming economy.

By chance, I met another new friend, a French woman, and within minutes we committed to exploring together. In friendship, rainy days became bright. Together we discovered the famous Yu Garden in the Old City, Chen Xiang Ge Temple, the Bund and the Old French Concession.

Bravely wondering off the beaten path, I gained a taste of the local culture by stumbling into open markets where live snakes and prawns were sold, and where pigs and poultry were butchered. We witnessed everyday life of hanging clothes, playing games, repairing bikes and participating in morning kung fu exhibitions.

One day, I took a bus to the city of Suzhou, considered the Venice of the East. I explored Tiger Hill, the tomb of the first emperor of the province; a 450-year-old garden, considered one of the four most famous in China; a 1,400-year-old active Buddhist temple; and the biggest silk factory in China, which produces 60 percent of China’s silk.

On our last evening, my husband and I attended a acrobatics show and were amazed by the strength, balance and coordination of the athletes as they performed their routines and daredevil stunts.

Overall, I was impressed with the hospitality and work ethic of the Chinese. Customer service was respectful, timely and always delivered with a smile. The Confucian belief in the golden rule was emulated in their actions.

I relish my historical explorations and local discoveries, but I’m even more elated to have made three new friends across the globe. As Confucius said, “Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.”

You might not hear ghost stories, but a campout on the Great Wall of China is full of magical moments.

The Chinese love song rang out through the misty hills from the mouth of guide John King only to be answered by a young female voice from across the valley. There are a great many surprises on the Great Wall that Hollywood could not script any better. But this was definitely not Hollywood.

John was singing a traditional love song, a Romeo and Juliet tale of ancient China where a boy and a girl fell in love across a mountainous valley by singing to each other. John broke into song and although this section of the Wall is mostly empty, a young female voice sang the response from a great distance.

On an overnight camping trip along the Great Wall it is hard not to imagine these magic moments as commonplace as the whole situation is so other-worldly.

The 6,700 kilometres of the Great Wall have been a work in progress since about 600 BC. Various emperors took their turns at building up parts of the Wall but the most recognizable portions were built during the Ming Dynasty from around 1400 AD. The Emperors of the time were beset by enemies from without and dissent from within and used the extensive wall system to maintain their military position. The Wall saw action as late as World War II when battles took place with Japanese forces.

The Great Wall is perhaps the most recognized symbol of China and favoured destination of travellers. There are many organized tours of the Wall, particularly of the sections which are fairly close to Beijing and have been restored to resemble its original appearance. These sections are also a haven for a multitude of cheap souvenir sellers, snack shops, rides and even professional photographers who will dress you up like a Ming dynasty warlord to take your photograph with the Wall as wallpaper. Most of the Wall however is crumbling and dishevelled and those parts are often called the Wild Wall. Jiankou is one of those wild sections.

Jiankou is 80 kilometres northwest of Beijing, beside the rural village of Xizhazi. Local farmers will open their house for lunch with traditional fare like fried peanuts, delicious stews made of indeterminable ingredients and the ubiquitous cold beer. A 30-minute hike from a farm here, mostly straight up through the bush will take you to the Jiankou section of the Wall.

The hike along the top of the Wall here can be at times mountaineering, at times bushwhacking and at times hanging on for dear life.

It is not a section to be attempted for the weak of heart, nor the weak of leg. It is also definitely not for anyone with vertigo or a fear of heights.

The Wild Wall here follows the knife edged ridge of the tops of the mountains. It is impossible to imagine how the thousands upon thousands of labourers were able to build it when it is difficult at times just to walk on it. The height and vertical drops of course merely enhance the wonderful vistas but most of the time you must look down to find the more stable portions of the path.

After several hours of hiking it is surprising to look down into a bit of a valley to see two incongruous bright nylon domes set up on top of the Wall. This is your Dome Sweet Dome for the night.

A villager had hiked the camping gear, complete with barbecue, charcoal, food, water and beer up and set it all up during the hike and the smell was magnificent.

The blackness of night descends quickly and completely. The nearby village is a hazy twinkle of light, much like seeing Christmas lights through a frosty window as the fog can be thick. It seemed like a time for some serious story telling.

After begging our guide for ghost stories and other tales from the Wall, he confessed he knew none. He did know one story but refused to tell it at night as he was sure it was so horrific that no one would sleep. The pleading was to no avail; not until morning he insisted. He knew his history backwards and forwards but had no thousand year old gossip to tell that night. It was suggested he make up stories about the Wall instead for future tourists to complete the adventure.

Having travellers sleep and eat where soldiers have patrolled and slept for thousands of years seems natural. Leaning over the edge to spit while brushing teeth can’t really compare to a soldier 600 years ago tossing spears and rocks onto the invading Mongol hordes.

Waking up to a surrounding fog obscured the hills completely. The villager came back to make breakfast and hike out the tents as the hike continued. The second day is more arduous and included a climb up a rickety, rusty ladder which is no longer attached to the Wall.

A trek on the wild parts of the Wallis guaranteed to be an unforgettable experience every bit as romantic, adventurous and rewarding as it sounds. It will be one of those highpoints in life to be recounted over and over and never forgotten.

As for the ancient story our guide refused to tell in the dark of night — “Some of the workers died while working on the wall and were buried nearby” — still needs work.

Today I will talk about the Great Wall in Beijing, which includes some famous sections: the Badaling, Huanghuacheng, Mutianyu, Jiankou, Gubeikou, Jinshanling and Simatai sections. But I want to introduce the Badaling section here.

As we all know that the Great Wall is a symbol of Chinese civilization, and one of the wonders that the Chinese people have created. Badaling Great Wall is virtually the most representative part. So if you want to experience the culture and enjoy the beauty of the Great Wall, meandering along the bricks of the Badaling Great Wall is your first choice.

Badaling Great Wall is situated in Yanqing County, over 70 kilometres (43 miles) north of Beijing. It is the most well-preserved section of the Great Wall, built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). This section with an average altitude of over 1,000 meters (3,282 feet) is the outpost of the Juyongguan Pass. The mountain slope is very steep and the roads are tortuous. These features made it a military stronghold. Badaling Great Wall is like a strong dragon winding its way along the mountain ranges.

The Great wall originally functioned as a fortification. As early as the Qin Dynasty (221BC-206BC), Qinshihuang, the first emperor of Qin Dynasty unified the whole nation and began to build the Great Wall to protect China’s borders from the intrusion of the northern nomadic tribes. Most parts of the preserved Badaling Great Wall were built and reinforced during the Ming Dynasty to defend the capital against the intrusion of these Mongolian people. The structure of the wall consists of huge bar-stones and bricks. The inside of the wall has been formed by tampering earth and small stones, which makes the wall very firm and strong. Internally, the wall is about six meters (20 feet) wide, which would allow horses to gallop five abreast. A number of small holes have been drilled on the wall to allow archers to shoot arrows. There is a barrel-drain and a moat both inside and outside the wall. In a word, military fortification has been paramount in the consideration of every wall detail.

Badaling Great Wall was the earliest part of the great Wall opened to tourists. It has drawn tens of millions of tourists both from home and abroad. More than 370 foreign leaders and celebrities have visited there.

Travel Tips:
1. The cable car can take the tourists to the fourth balefire tower, 40 Yuan/ person for one trip and 60 Yuan/person for a return trip. If you do not want to enter the Great Wall Park and want to take the cable care only, buy the round way ticket, namely, the 60 Yuan ticket for the cable car, because at the end of the cable trip on the mountain you will not get off the cable car except you go through the park.
2. The Badaling Great Wall was built on a very sharp and sheer slope. In such a windy place where temperature is normally a few degrees lower than in the city, t is highly suggested that bring a good windproof jacket along and put your high heels away. Best shoes for climbing the Great Wall are apparently good quality sneakers.

As we all know, the Great Wall is the treasure of China – even the world. It really is a great masterpiece of mankind, with its beautiful scenes and grand construction. What many people may not know, however, is that in different periods of Chinese history the material of the Great Wall is different in different areas.

Before the use of bricks, the Great Wall was mainly built from earth, stones and wood. Due to the large quantity of materials required to construct the Great Wall, the builders always tried to use local sources. When building over the mountain ranges, the stones of the mountain were exploited and used; while in the plains, earth was rammed into solid blocks to be used in construction. In the desert, even the sanded reeds and juniper tamarisks were used to build the Great Wall.

Before and during the Qin Dynasty (221BC-206BC), because the earth buildings could withstand the strength of weapons like swords and spears and there was low technology of productivity, the Great Wall was basically built by stamping earth between board frames. As such, only walls of plain earth or earth with gravel inside were built. No fortresses were constructed along the wall, nor bricks used in the construction of gates at the passes. Some of the walls were even made only from piles of crude stones. Around Dunhuang City in Gansu Province, Yulin City in Shaanxi Province and Baotou City in Inner Mongolia, sites can still be found from the Great Wall of Qin, the Great Wall of Han and the Wall of Zhao. The Wall of Zhao was built during the Warring States Period using board frames, and the layers of earth can still be clearly seen.

During the period following the Han Dynasty (202BC-220AD), earth or crude stones were still popular building tools. The construction material did not reach a new level until the middle of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644); however the principle of using local material was maintained. Three hundred million cubic meters (393 million yards) of earthwork were used in the construction of the Great Wall, and with the appearance of large brick and lime workshops, some parts were also built with these new materials.

Bricks were used in a lot of areas during the Ming Dynasty, as well as materials such as tiles and lime. Attempts were always made to produce the materials locally, so kiln workshops were established to burn the crude material. In a construction team there was Material Supply Department. For example, in Juyongguan Pass names of supply departments such as kiln workshops, stone ponds and material supply departments were recorded. Some materials, such as the timbers for the construction of the passes, did have to be transported from outside areas when there were none available locally. Bricks were more a convenient material than earth and stone as their small size and light weight made them convenient to carry and thus quickened the speed of construction. Bricks are also the ideal material to bear the weight. According to a sample experiment experiencing gravity and erosion over a hundred years, the compressive strength, resistance to freezing and absorbency of the bricks of the time are similar to today’s common bricks. A huge brick from a hundred years ago showed a high level of technological skill for that time. For further ease of construction, different shapes of brick were also burned and made to stuff into different positions. Stone, however, still has its advantages.

Stones cut in rectangular shapes were mostly used to build the foundation, inner and outer brims, and gateways of the Great Wall. In the Badaling section, the Great Wall is made almost entirely of granite, some of green and white stones and some of white marble. The stone material was found to better resist efflorescence than bricks.

It is not only because of the high level of productivity of the time that hard material like bricks and stones were used in the construction of the Great Wall, but also because of the development of weapons. Before the Ming Dynasty, the Great Wall was built from board frames and, although not very solid, could withhold simple weapons like swords, spears and bows. But during the Ming Dynasty, gunpowder became available. The musket, blunderbuss and cannon appeared. Due to the use of these weapons, more solid bricks and stones were required to build a stronger Great Wall.

The Great Wall of China embodies the great systems of defense created during the wars of the time; moreover it indicates a great achievement in architecture.