Great wall of China was an ancient gigantic defensive project. It is one of the largest construction projects ever completed.
Great Wall of China is one of the greatest wonders of the world. It winds its way westward over the vast territory of China from the bank of the Yalu River and ends at the foot of snow-covered Qilianshan and Tianshan mountains. It is seldom that we see such a gigantic project in China or elsewhere in the world. The Chinese call it the Wall of 10,000 li. Its size is better seen on a map or from an aerial photograph. According to astronauts who looked back from the moon, of all projects built by man, the Great Wall of China is the most conspicuous seen in space.
Present Great Wall of China
Today, the Great wall has lost its strategic importance and has become a world-renowned tourist attraction. The laboring people of different dynasties demonstrated their intelligence and wisdom while building this great project. They left behind a precious heritage deserving our everlasting care. Badaling section, Juyong pass and Cloud Terrace were listed as important historical monuments under special preservation by the Chinese government in 1961. The Great Wall was listed by UNESCO in 1987 as one of the world heritages.
When you see this massive structure snaking its way across precipitous, rocky ridges, sometimes even lain across iron beams to bridge windy chasms, you will be amazed by the sheer scale of the undertaking. From the Bohai Sea in the East toDunhuang’s desert plains in the West, the Great Wall stretches its knotted spine. Looking at it, perhaps you will wonder why.
From earliest times civilizations such as those of the Greeks and Hebrews enclosed their cities within a perimeter wall. In China during the fifth century BC, the Warring States took this concept one step further extending their walls to encircle entire territories. When Qinshihuang, the Qin dynasty Emperor, unified China, he joined the walls along the Northern frontier to prevent the incursions of the barbaric northern tribes. Thousands of slaves were sacrificed for the completion of this ambitious endeavor, and the Great Wall was viewed by the people as a symbol of tyrannical oppression. As subsequent dynasties expanded or contracted, so some sort of wall was built to delineate their Northern frontier.
It wasn’t until after the Ming dynasty swept away Mongolian rule in the fifteenth century that the Great Wall was constructed as the regal and systematic fortification that you can see today. To understand the motivating reason for this Ming dynasty project, we must first review what it meant to undergo a Mongolian invasion. When the Horde burst out of the steppes a century earlier, this illiterate, nomadic tribe did not limit itself to the merciless murder, rape and pillage of people and cities. Such was their appetite for conquest that the wild nomads even burned their mark into vast swathes of cultivated farmland. The traumatic scar that these warring foreigners left on the Chinese psyche can today be measured in cubic meters according to the dimensions of the huge and incredible Great Wall of China.
The Ming dynasty’s effort to reinforce the wall was not in vain. The Great Wall was useful in checking the advance of the Manchu invaders in the seventeenth century. That the Ming finally succumbed was not due to any failure in this fortification, but to the worldly guile of a ravishing Manchu princess. That, though, is another story.
Time has now washed the Great Wall clean of its tyrannical undertones. While some Chinese people gloomily regard it as a symbol of China’s insensitivity to new ideas, others prefer to view it as a remarkable, historical achievement. Richard Nixon ably summed up this view:
“This is a Great Wall and only a great people with a great past could have a great wall and such a great people with a such a great wall will surely have a great future.”
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