History of the Great Wall of China

Although a useful deterrent against raids, at several points throughout its history the Great Wall failed to stop enemies, including in 1644 when the Qing troops marched through the gates of the Shanhai Pass and replaced the most ardent of the wall-building dynasties, the Ming, as rulers of China proper.

Likewise, according to this model, walls not only enveloped cities as time went by, but also lined the borders of the feudal states and eventually the whole Chinese empire to provide protection against raids from the agrarian northern steppes.

[16] Heading west along the Yin Mountains, the range ends where the Yellow River circles northwards upstream in the area known as the Ordos Loop – technically part of the steppe, but capable of irrigated agriculture.

[18] When influence from the steppe powers of Mongolia waned, the various Central Asian oasis kingdoms and nomadic clans like the Göktürks and Uyghurs were able to form their own states and confederations that threatened China at times.

As a result, an estimated total of 1,775 kilometres (1,103 mi) of Qin walls (including spurts) extended from southern Gansu to the bank of the Yellow River in the Jungar Banner, close to the border with Zhao at the time.

[44] Soon after the conquests, in the year 215 BC, the emperor sent the famed general Meng Tian to the Ordos region to drive out the Xiongnu nomads settled there, who had risen from beyond the fallen marginal states along the northern frontier.

This work was completed probably by 212 BC, signalled by Qin Shi Huang's imperial tour of inspection and the construction of the Direct Road (直道) connecting the capital Xianyang with the Ordos.

The sinologist Derk Bodde posits in The Cambridge History of China that "for every man whom Meng Tian could put to work at the scene of actual construction, dozens must have been needed to build approaching roads and to transport supplies.

"[50] This is supported by the Han dynasty statesman Zhufu Yan's description of Qin Shi Huang's Ordos project in 128 BC: ... the land was brackish and arid, crops could not be grown on them. ...

"[52] Meng Tian's settlements in the north were abandoned, and the Xiongnu nomads moved back into the Ordos Loop as the Qin empire became consumed by widespread rebellion due to public discontent.

Owen Lattimore concluded that the whole project relied upon military power to enforce agriculture on a land more suited for herding, resulting in "the anti-historical paradox of attempting two mutually exclusive forms of development simultaneously" that was doomed to fail.

[56] Sima Qian, the author of the Records of the Grand Historian, describes the result of this agreement as one of peace and friendship: "from the chanyu downwards, all the Xiongnu grew friendly with the Han, coming and going along the Long Wall".

[58] To Chinese minds, the heqin policy was humiliating and ran contrary to the Sinocentric world order like "a person hanging upside down", as the statesman Jia Yi (d. 169 BC) puts it.

[81] The dynastic history of Sui estimates that 500,000 people died building the wall,[82] adding to the number of casualties caused by Emperor Yang's projects including the aforementioned redesign of Luoyang, the Grand Canal, and two ill-fated campaigns against Goguryeo.

[84] Soon after the establishment of the Tang dynasty, during the reign of Emperor Taizong (r. 626–649), the threat of Göktürk tribesmen from the north prompted some court officials to suggest drafting corvée labourers to repair the aging Great Wall.

"[85] Accordingly, Taizong sent talented generals like Li Shiji with mobile armies to the frontier, while fortifications were mostly limited to a series of walled garrisons, such as the euphemistically named "cities for accepting surrender" (受降城, shòuxiáng chéng) that were actually bases from which to launch attacks.

The Song utilized the walls built during the reign of Qin's King Zhaoxiang of the Warring States period, making it the Song–Western Xia border,[93] but the topography of the area was not as sharp and distinct as the Song–Liao defences to the east.

[98] The Khitan leader, Abaoji's second son Yelü Deguang, convinced Shi to found a new dynasty (the Later Jin, 936–946), and received the crucial border region known as the Sixteen Prefectures in return.

Although he established garrisons along the steppe frontier from the Juyan Lake Basin in the far west to Yingchang in the east,[114] Kublai Khan and the Yuan emperors after him did not add to the Great Wall (except for the ornate Cloud Platform at Juyong Pass).

[117] In 1373, as Ming forces encountered setbacks, Hongwu put more emphasis on defence and adopted Hua Yunlong's (華雲龍) suggestion to establish garrisons at 130 passes and other strategic points in the Beijing area.

This wall, a combined effort between Yu Zijun and Wang Yue, stretched from present day Hengcheng (橫城) in Lingwu (northwestern Ningxia province) to Huamachi town (花馬池鎮) in Yanchi County, and from there to Qingshuiying (清水營) in northeastern Shaanxi, a total of more than 2000 li (about 1,100 kilometres (680 mi)) long.

Historians such as Arthur Waldron and Julia Lovell are critical of the whole wall-building exercise in light of its ultimate failure in protecting China; the former compared the Great Wall with the failed Maginot Line of the French in World War II.

Perhaps the first recorded instance of a European actually entering China via the Great Wall came in 1605, when the Portuguese Jesuit brother Bento de Góis reached the northwestern Jiayu Pass from India.

One of the embassy's members, John Barrow, later founder of the Royal Geographical Society, spuriously calculated that the amount of stone in the Wall was equivalent to "all the dwelling houses of England and Scotland" and would suffice to encircle the Earth at the equator twice.

[165] Exposure to such works brought many foreign visitors to the Great Wall after China opened its borders as a result of the nation's defeat in the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century at the hands of Britain and the other Western powers.

For example, an influential writer of this period, Lu Xun, harshly criticized the "mighty and accursed Great Wall"[169] in a short essay: "In reality, it has never served any purpose than to make countless workers labour to death in vain ... [It] surrounds everyone.

[171] With the Chinese forces eventually overrun, the subsequent Tanggu Truce stipulated that the Great Wall was to become a demilitarized zone separating China and the newly created Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), hundreds of kilometres of the Great Wall – already damaged in the wars of the last century and eroded by wind and rain – were deliberately destroyed by fervent Red Guards who regarded it as part of the "Four Olds" to be eradicated in the new China.

More recently, in the 1930s and 1940s, Wang Guoliang (王國良) and Shou Pengfei (壽鵬飛) produced exhaustive studies that culled extant literary records to date and mapped the courses of early border walls.

[186] For example, the 18th-century sinologist Joseph de Guignes assigned macrohistorical importance to such walls when he advanced the theory that the Qin construction forced the Xiongnu to migrate west to Europe and, becoming known as the Huns, ultimately contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.