Chinese city wall

However, in classical Chinese, the character chéng (城) denoted the defensive wall of the "inner city" which housed government buildings.

The character guō (郭) denoted the defensive wall of the "outer city", housing mainly residences.

It matters little how large, important, and well ordered a settlement may be; if not properly defined and enclosed by walls, it is not a city in the traditional Chinese sense.

[1]The invention of the city wall is attributed to the semi-historical sage Gun (鯀) of the Xia dynasty, father of Yu the Great.

[4][5] In 15th century BC the Shang dynasty constructed large walls around the site of Ao with dimensions of 20 metres (66 ft) in width at the base and enclosed an area of some 2,100 yards (1,900 m) squared.

The city walls of Suzhou followed afterward under largely the same plan created by Wu Zixu in the 5th century BC.

[9] By the end of the Eastern Han dynasty local gentry, clansmen, and villagers built more confined defensive structures in the form of square forts known as wū bì (塢壁).

According to Stephen Turnbull, the wū bì are the closest approximation to the concept of a European castle that has ever existed in Chinese history.

[11]Under the Sui dynasty, the capital of Chang'an was renamed Da Xingcheng and its outer wall was expanded to cover a perimeter of 35 km.

While Chinese city walls always had an earthen core, the outer facings could be of either baked bricks laid in lime mortar, or stone where it was commonly available, such as in Sichuan.

A study of Han forts in Xinjiang found that they had brushwood and poplar interspersed between the layers of tamped earth.

[18] At the Former Han capital of Chang'an, the city wall constructed around 200 BC by Yang Yangcheng was 15m tall and 12m wide.

In areas of rugged relief, however, a square form was usually replaced by one of irregular shape, determined in many cases by topographic conditions.

The size of the enclosed area of the typical walled city decreases southward, indicative of the magnitude of regional urbanization in Ming times or earlier.

[24] The City Wall of Nanjing, built during the Ming dynasty, enclosed an area large enough to house an airport, bamboo forests, and lakes in modern times.

Gatehouses were generally built of wood and brick, which sat atop a raised and expanded section of the wall, surrounded by crenellated battlements.

An "archery tower" was often placed in front of the main gatehouse, forming a barbican (Chinese: 瓮城; pinyin: wèngchéng).

A city resolutely defended could withstand attack from the largest armies, and Chinese history includes many tales of famous sieges and heroic defenses.

Even in modern warfare city walls continued to play a vital role in the Chinese concept of effective defense.

According to Tonio Andrade, this was not a matter of metallurgy, which was sophisticated in China, and the Ming dynasty did construct large guns in the 1370s, but never followed up afterwards.

Nor was it the lack of warfare, which other historians have suggested to be the case, but does not stand up to scrutiny as walls were a constant factor of war which stood in the way of many Chinese armies since time immemorial into the twentieth century.

[31] European walls of the 1200s and 1300s could reach the Roman equivalents but rarely exceeded them in length, width, and height, remaining around 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) thick.

Medieval European walls for castles were mostly constructed of stone interspersed with gravel or rubble filling and bonded by limestone mortar.

Chinese walls used a variety of different materials depending on the availability of resources and the time period - ranging from stones to bricks to rammed earth.

[8] By the medieval period, Chinese walls with rammed earthen cores which absorbed the energy of artillery shots were common.

This held true into the twentieth century, when even modern explosive shells had some difficulty in breaking through tamped earth walls.

Communist artillery shells may have been able to play havoc with the old wooden drum tower above one gate, but they could not make more than dents and scratches on the brick work.

[40]Andrade goes on to question whether or not Europeans would have developed large artillery pieces in the first place had they faced the more formidable Chinese style walls, coming to the conclusion that such exorbitant investments in weapons unable to serve their primary purpose would not have been ideal.

Only small parts of the city walls protecting the Confucian compound in Qufu are authentic, the rest having been demolished in 1978 and rebuilt in recent years.

Substantial remains of the gates of Zhengding in Hebei have survived but the walls have largely been stripped to their earthen core.