This week, I chose to read the chapter “Early Chinese Walls” in The Great Wall of China.

In class we discussed how the exact origin of the Great Wall is still debated by archaeologists and historians. “Early Chinese Walls” discusses the building of walls, for homes and around villages, for protection. However, it states that these walls built early in China’s history were not Great Walls until the enterprise of wall construction developed. Materials used in building the wall changed with technological advances, and in the beginning the walls were built from compacted dirt, while later Dynasties used brick and marble. The “Ch’in Dynasty conquered China and implemented a ten thousand “li” (li = a third of a mile) long wall – a border defense system, but did not build all new walls and repaired and connected the walls that had been built over centuries by the Warring States. The nomads in the north were forced out of their territory and the walls were a barrier to the nomads as well as against competing Chinese states.  The construction required great amounts of work: over a billion cubic meters of stone and earth were moved and the labor of 400,000 men.

The Great Wall has existed and has been built over a period of 2,000 years but much of it has deteriorated and the early walls have been built over. The author suggests that there is no one Great Wall, mentioned in many historical records; when the Mongols invaded China, a poem written by Wang Yün, the accounts of Marco Polo and Sir George Staunton, and Wang Fu’s paintings. However, there is a record of agreements with the nomads establishing boundaries set by the Great Wall. There are also records of wall building across many dynasties as well as historical maps that depict the existence of walls. Many more treaties were made as well, again implying the existence of the wall. Finally, the author concludes that there have been countless walls constructed but that the term “The Great Wall” is an umbrella term. To make sense of the walls in China, it is important to understand the individual challenges of the dynasties that built them, and not lump all the walls and their incarnations into one.

The reading from The Great Wall in 50 Objects is about an object related to the Great Wall that has cultural and historical importance. These are wooden records that contained  instructions about signals for the soldiers guarding different sections of the Great Wall, because the Chinese couldn’t have enough soldiers in the right place at the right time if there was an attack by the Nomadic peoples. These instructions created a system that allowed the soldiers to respond to special signals. They illustrate the painstaking efforts of the workers and soldiers on the Han Dynasty frontier as tens of thousands of these records have been discovered.

Bibliography

Waldron, Arthur. The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature, and Institutions. Cambridge 

England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Lindesay, William. The Great Wall in 50 Objects. Paperback ed. Melbourne, Vic.: Viking, an Imprint of Penguin Books, 2015.

Abrams, Amah-Rose. “One Third of Great Wall of China Has Perished.” Artnet News, 18 Sept. 2015, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/china-report-of-great-wall-312912.