The Chinese were building walls long before construction of the Great Wall of China was begun. around4000 B.C., the people of ancient china till then nomadic hunters of wild game, developed agriculture. Tending to crops and fields kept them in one place; temporary farming settlements and then permanent villages began to spring up. It was in such ancient villages that the first Chinese walls were built to guard against attacks by neighboring villagers.

Several such Neolithic or new Stone Age, walls have been unearthed. Some of the best preserved sites are located in the Shensi province, where archaeologists uncovered remnants of a protective perimeter wall_ that once surrounded a village. The wall measures about400 by450 yards, stood nearly 20 feet high, and was about 27 feet wide across its top. Such walls were erected by a primitive but efficient method of wall con-striation known as the hang-t’u method.

The name comes from two Chinese words, hang meaning pounded or beaten and t’u, which translates as”earth.” Builders began by constructing a frame of wood planks or bamboo. This formed the mold for the wall. Earth was then un-loaded into the mold and packed tightly to minimize settling with prolonged use. The wall was slowly built up in layers, each perhaps. Only a few inches thick. Workers stood inside tbe framework and, using some type of ramming or pounding tool, beat the dirt down until firm. Peter Nancarrow, in his book early china and the wall, describes evidence of this packing technique in the unearthed wall remnants:

Chinese history is fraught with periods of intense warfare, as this battle illustration from a.D.150 suggests. The earliest Chinese walls were probably created to serve as instruments of defense. The first noticeable thing about the wall is that it is made up of sharply defined layers of earth, each about five inches (thirteen centimeters) thick. Secondly, the When a layer of earth was adequately compacted, more dirt was thrown into the mold, and the process was repeated. Once the wall reached the desired height, the workers pulled the forms off the wall, leaving a stable and extremely durable mass of tightly packed earth.