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Great Wall Of China

When you come to China, Visiting Great Wall will be the must thing you should do for your China tours. Thousands of years ago, a people in Asia began to build some-thing unlike anything else on earth. Called the Great Wall of China, it is the longest structure ever built. Like a sleeping dragon, the mysterious wall snakes its way across the Northern provinces of china, from the pacific coast at its eastern end touts western end in the Gobi desert. Between its two endpoints, the Great Wall of China winds across frozen plains, rugged mountains, and dry, sandy plateaus. great wall of china

Never, in ancient times or modern, has anyone built a monument that matches the form, scope, and dimension of the Great wall. It is unique in design as well as length. The sheer volume of materials used in building the wall is staggering. It has been estimated that the great wall contains enough stone, brick, and rubble to form a wall eight feet high and three feet thick encircling the equator, a distance of approximately twenty-five thousand miles. In his book the Great Wall of China, Robert Silverberg describes the engineering triumph that the great wall represents

The wall is an overwhelming thing. It is one of the wonders of the world, though not one of the ancients even wonders of the world. That canon was drawn up by Greek who knew of china if at all, only as a legendary land somewhere in the cloud-shrouded east. Moreover, the last of the classical seven wonders was built in280 B.C., six decades before [Emperor] Chin Shih Huang Ti (Qin shi Huang Di) embarked on his wall-building project. Of the original seven wonders, only the pyramid of khufu survives today. The wall endures.

WALL'S TWISTING COURSE

The sheer size of the great wall is difficult to imagine. Various comparisons have been made to help people grasp the enormity of such an undertaking for the ancient Chinese. For example, if the great wall could be removed to Europe, it would surround all or most of France, Switzerland, Italy,

Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Russia, and the former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. An English surveyor observing the great wall in1793 estimated that just to build the great wall’s watchtowers would require more stone and brick than had been used to build all the buildings in the London of his day

Estimates of the Great Wall's length vary; in large part be-cause throughout Chinese history several walls have been con-strutted. The wall known today is not the result of a single project. the primary wall lying between shenanigan in theist and Jiayuguan in the west measures l,850 miles. This stretch of wall, built between 1403 and 1424 during the Ming dynasty, made use of earlier walls. However, if all the great Wall s extensions and supplementary routes are included, its total length approaches4r000 miles. Jonathan fryer in his book the great wall of china, explains the difficulty in deter-miming the exact length of the wall. Nobody has overseen the whole length of the wall, and no two authoritative maps agree as to its exact course.

Frequently, the great wall, with its meandering course, which hugs the curves and dips of many mountain chains, is compared to a dragon. At shenanigan pass, where the wall begins in the east, stand guard towers that have been referred to for centuries as the old dragon's head. The wall then represents the great dragon's twisting body. The symbolism is important to the Chinese: Traditionally, the dragon has been a revered Asian symbol of strength and energy

AN ENGINEERING FEAT

Certainly, constructing this immense barrier required strength and energy. All of its thousands of miles were erected centuries ago without the aid of sophisticated equipment or a nonmanual power source. The work was done by hundreds of thousands of human beings and draft animals. Sections of the great wall near Beijing, for example, consist of two-ton granite stones erected to a height of twenty feet. Atop this base, the ancient workers built stone parapets or low walls along its edges, for protection, rising additional five feet. Between the parapets, the wall features a paved road wide enough to accommodate five mounted horses galloping side by side. This basic wall design required the fine cutting of thousands of granite stones for each mile of construction, and all of the work was done by hand. Moreover, such labor-intensive endeavor was complicated by the twisting and Turing Mountains of china's highlands. In some places the wall climbs over peaks nearly two miles in height.

The modern Chinese writer Luo Zewen, who has visited the great wall, gives his perspective on the engineering feat that the wall represents:Sanding on Juyongguan, Badaling, Shanhaiguan, or Jiayuguan pass, one cannot help marveling at the great wall seen winding like a snake among the towering mountains. since we today are invariably out of breath from climbing the wall empty-handed, it must have been strenuous indeed for the builders in ancient times to carry the bricks weighing more than ten kilograms apiece(or22 pounds), and stone slabs weighing hundreds of kilograms, to the mountain tops and ridges.<. They. paid dearly in sweat and blood for this project .The building, and continual rebuilding, of this structure is of course a technical subject-but when we consider the technical means available at the time of its construction, we realize that this is a human story after all, a testimony to human will and perseverance.

WHERE EXACTLY IS THE GREAT WALL?

In some ways the great wall remains a mystery, even to the Chinese people themselves. As far as can be deter-mined, the wall has never been surveyed in its entirety. No one has ever accurately placed its course on a map. Even modern maps typically show the great wall on a course plotted centuries ago by three Jesuit priests who were working for the Qing emperor Kangxi. The priests map, since lost was given to the emperor in 1708. It is widely assumed that the Jesuits did not actually travel the entire length of the great wall. New maps are on the way, however. an aerial survey of the wall has been on-going since the early 1980s, but experts say that it will take decades to completely survey catalog and map it

Not only is the Wall s exact course in question but archaeologists have yet to adequately explore its complete length. Sections of the Wall that have survived intact over the centuries have been thoroughly studied but there are still hundreds of miles of the Great Wall that remain untouched by modern surveyors scientists and geographers

WALL AND GEOGRAPHY

The Great Wall extends across three drastically different geographic regions. The western end of the Wall is anchored in desert lands including the Gobi a desert of half a million square miles in east-central Asia. Here the Wall is mostly in ruin and little of its original course can be found today.

The central sections of the great wall pass through what is often called the mud region. This area lies across the Ordos Steppes, where the great Chinese waterway, the yellow river, follows a winding course, first running north, then east, and then south, forming something close to a gigantic horseshoe the Ordos consists of forty thousand square miles of yellowish, sandy soil and quicksand. historically, it was here that Genghis khan, the fearsome leader of the Mongols to the north, breached the great wall in the thirteenth century A.D. even today, local village people say that as the wind whistles at night across the sandy dunes of the Odors, they can still hear the fighting between ancient Chinese soldiers and Mongolian invaders. legend also has it that a horse belonging to the first true Chinese emperor, Qin shih Huang Ti, laid out the route of the ancient wall across the Ordos. as the story goes, a saddle was fastened to the horse's tail and dragged along the ground as the animal walked, marking the route of the Great Wall. East of the Ordos region, the great wall stretches across the precipitous mountains of eastern china. For part of the route, the wall follows the yellow river. As the great stone dragon approaches the ancient city of Peking (modern Beijing) it loops250 miles north around the city. This section is in better shape than any other portion of the wall. Once past Beijing, the wall winds its way over a high mountain range to the yellow sea. Its final miles end in a coastal fortress, called a citadel, located on the Gulf of Liaotung. The wall even continues out into the gulf to form a jetty, a structure designed to protect the harbor. Tradition says that the jetty was built on vast ships which were sunk voluntarily to provide foundations.