[VOL I] THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA

THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA (*Wen-li-tchang-tching, “The Great-Wall of the Ten Thousand Li.” It extends from the shores of the Gulf of Pechele, 34° degrees east from Peking, to Sening, which is 15 degrees west of that city.)

Cover Image: The Great Wall of China / BeiJing China / Drawn by T.Allom Engraved by J.Sands – ALAMY Image ID:2X2MWBX

*The Great Wall of China is a series of fortifications that were built across the historical northern borders of ancient Chinese states and Imperial China as protection against various nomadic groups from the Eurasian Steppe. Several walls were built from as early as the 7th century BC,with selective stretches later joined by Qin Shi Huang (220–206 BC), the first emperor of China. Little of the Qin wall remains.Later on, many successive dynasties built and maintained multiple stretches of border walls. The best-known sections of the wall were built by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

Apart from defense, other purposes of the Great Wall have included border controls, allowing the imposition of duties on goods transported along the Silk Road, regulation or encouragement of trade and the control of immigration and emigration.Furthermore, the defensive characteristics of the Great Wall were enhanced by the construction of watchtowers, troop barracks, garrison stations, signaling capabilities through the means of smoke or fire, and the fact that the path of the Great Wall also served as a transportation corridor.

The frontier walls built by different dynasties have multiple courses. Collectively, they stretch from Liaodong in the east to Lop Lake in the west, from the present-day Sino–Russian border in the north to Tao River (Taohe) in the south; along an arc that roughly delineates the edge of the Mongolian steppe; spanning 21,196.18 km (13,170.70 mi) in total.Today, the defensive system of the Great Wall is generally recognized as one of the most impressive architectural feats in history.

O’er field and flood, o’er mountain, plain, and vale,
Like that vast dragon of a perish’d world,
Its hydra-heads of war and stony trail
Invasion daunt, and mock at hosts unful’d.
The Roman(†Regulus) thus did Afric’s snake arrest,
And the flush’d legions check’d, that fated Carthage press’d.

C. J. C.

A RUDE state of society, the wandering habits of uncivilized nations, and a wrong estimate of the quality of vengeance, may have rendered defensive military architecture both necessary and effectual in the early ages of mankind. Simple earth-works for such objects still survive in many countries, the annals of those primitive people have become either confused or extinct; besides, have not the Medes, Syrians, Egyptians, Romans, Picts, and Welsh, left abiding evidence of the confidence which they placed in mural protection? Eastward of the Caspian sea a boundary wall was built by one of the successors of Alexander the Great; and Tamerlane, too, did not despise the security which such structures afforded. These two latter lines of separation and defence, like the great wall of the Celestial Empire, were drawn, to restrain the sudden irruptions of nomadic Tartars. In all instances, however, in which the authors of these great records of past time can be determined with certainty, the painful fact is stated, that the most absolute tyranny, and in the most abject slavery, such structures had their origin. This truth detracts considerably from that feeling of pleasure with which the antiquary pursues an inquiry into their origin, and reduces the investigation to the motive which actuated some barbarian conqueror, who had succeeded in trampling upon the liberties of millions. Voltaire views the Pyramids of Egypt as so many monuments of slavery, under the weight of which, like the tomb of king Mausolus, the country long continued to groan. And is he not justified in his conclusion, if the story told by Herodotus be true? – “In one of the pyramids of Gizéh,” says this ancient historian, “are entombed the bones of Cheops; in another, of his brother, Cephrenes. One hundred thousand men were employed during twenty years in raising the greatest of these enormous works; and from that period the memory of Cheops has been held in the utmost detestation by the Egyptians.” Such also are the feelings and recollections associated with the formation of the Chinese wall. It is said that every third man in the empire was drafted, and obliged to assist in the building—that, being scantily supplied with food, four hundred thousand died of hunger, ill-usage, and excessive fatigue; and, the Chinese sentence which commemorates these miseries, characterizes the work itself as “the annihilation of one generation, but salvation of a thousand.”Nor can the slavery of the Egytians, In constructing the pyramids, be compared with that of the Chinese in obeying the commands of their imperial taskmaster, if the quantity of matter raised, and put together by manual labour, in each case, be admitted as the criterion: for, “the materials of all the dwelling-houses in Great Britain, allowing them to average on the whole two thousand cubic feet of masonry, would be barely equivalent to the solid contents of the Chinese wall.” (* “To give another idea of the mass of matter in this stupendous fabric, it may be observed, that it is more than sufficient to surround the circumference of the earth, on two of its great circles, with two walls, each six feet high and two feet thick.”)

Before the Mantchoo Tartars subjugated China Proper, the Great Wall, one of the most gigantic, yet perhaps one of the most senseless conceptions that ever occupied the human intellect, was the northern boundary of the empire; and it owes its foundation to Chi-Hoang-Ti, of the fourth Ts’in dynasty, who ascended the throne two hundred and thirty-seven years before the birth of Christ, and was the first universal monarch of China. Finding the petty princes of Tartary troublesome to his frontier subjects, he sent an army against the former, and drove them into the recesses of their mountains, and employed the latter, during this interval of rest, in building a rampart to exclude all freebooters for the future. Some Chinese historians who abhor the memory of this fierce despot, deny him even the unenviable merit of being the sole projector of this vast work, asserting that he only built the portion that bounds the province of Chen-si, the other parts being raised by the different potentates whose respective kingdoms they enclosed. This opinion, however, is not sufficiently supported, and history now confides to Chi-Hoang-Ti the undisputed authorship of this “wonder of the world.”

It might also be argued, from the general character of this fiery prince, that he was, most probably, the real originator of this colossal project. The quality of his ambition, as well as of the chief actions by which he is remembered, lend an air of probability to the statement. Having put all the Tartar princes of the neighbouring territories, and all their male relatives, to cruel deaths, with the exception of the king of Tsi, whom he enclosed within a pine-grove and left there to perish, he united their dominions to his own. His next great public act was the colonizing of the Japan islands, by sending thither three hundred young men and women, under the conduct of a gallant naval officer, who soon, however, threw off his allegiance, and made himself sovereign lord of the territory. The construction of the Great Wall would have been more than sufficient to have perpetuated this monarch’s fame, and most tyrants would have been content with such a stupendous monument: but, such was the insatiable ambition of Chi-Hoang-ti, that he resolved not only on immortalizing his own name, but on annihilating those of his predecessors. To effect this most ungenerous object by a single blow, he caused all the books in which the lives and actions of former emperors were recorded, to be committed to the flames, with a degree of infamy unparalleled perhaps in history, except in the instance of the Alexandrian library, which the Caliph Omar is said to have destroyed in a similar manner.

The eastern end of Chi-Hoang’s wall extends into the Gulf of Leau ou-tong, (*“Our line lay along the shore of Tartary, where the Chinese wall meets the sea, not at the point generally supposed, but at a large town apparently a place of great trade. This great work is seen scaling the precipices and topping the craggy hills of the country, which have along this coast a most desolate appearance. Some of the party who went in-shore in the steamer to within two miles’ distance, made the discovery that the opinion hitherto received from Lord Macartney’s works, that the wall came down abruptly into the sea, was erroneous, as it traverses a low flat for some miles from the foot of the mountains before entering the town, which stands upon the water’s edge.” — Lord Jocelyn’s Journal, &c.) in the same latitude nearly as Peking. It consists of huge blocks of granite, resting on piles or pedestals supposed to be composed of the hulks of ships filled with iron, which the emperor caused to be sunk in the sea as a secure foundation. (†The French missionaries who visited China in the eighteenth century, brought home a perfect representation of the whole Chinese wall, beautifully drawn on satin. The original has been mislaid, but copies are preserved in the public libraries of Paris. When the emperors of the Ming dynasty had succeeded in expelling the descendants of Kublai Khan, the Mongol conqueror, a second wall was built to the west from Peking, and considerably within that of Chi-Hoang-Ti. Besides this, a stockade or palisade, seven feet high, extends from the sea-extremity of the wall, enclosing the Mougdon district of Leauo-tong; but these defences,scarcely sufficient to check the midnight thief, should not be confused with the Great Wall of China.)Extending westward, its fronts are finished with perfect accuracy, the workmen having been warned, on pain of death, to close the joints with such exactitude that a nail could not be driven between them. The style of building resembles that exhibited in the walls of Peking, and of other fortified cities, the dimensions, however, being considerably greater. Its average height is twenty feet, including five feet of parapet rising from the platform or rampart, which is fifteen from the ground-level. The thickness at the base is twenty-five feet, and on the platform fifteen. The structure consists of two front or retaining walls, two feet in thickness, the interval being filled up with earth, rubble-stone, or other loose material. To the height of six feet, the fronts are of hewn granite; the upper part entirely of sun-dried brick of a blue colour. The platform, which is paved with bricks, is approached by stairs of the same material, or of stone, ascending so gradually that horses do not refuse to tread them. In the province of Pecheli, the wall is terraced, and cased with bricks; as it enters Chensi it begins to be of inferior workmanship, sometimes only of earth; but, on the side of Chao-hou-keou, to which the Muscovite merchants come direct from Selingsiko in Siberia, it is again of stone and bricks, with large and strong towers always garrisoned. From this point southward, military posts are erected along the banks of the Hoang-ho, in which guards are maintained, to keep the boundary between the neighbouring provinces of Chan-si and Chen-si, and prevent the navigation of the river by hostile tribes. Passing the Hoang-ho into the province of Chen-si, the wall is generally of earth, in some places quite obliterated, but, in remarkable passes it is defended by either towers or large towns, (‡ Such are, Qu-ling-hien, Ning-hia, Lan-tcheou, Kan-tcheou, Seu-tcheou, Si-ning. ) Where military mandarins, with a strong force, are usually stationed.

Notwithstanding the frail character of the materials in several places, this great national work, fifteen hundred miles in extent, has undoubtedly endured for two thousand years, with but indifferent care and little restoration; in fact, the union of the countries on different sides of the wall, under the same dynasty, has rendered its aid no longer necessary, and occasioned, therefore, its total neglect. There was a time when a million of scimitars glittered along its length from east to west, but all fear of invasion having subsided, government is now content with guarding the chief passes that communicate with foreign countries. Wherever a river was to be passed, an arch or arches of solid masonry was thrown across, protected by iron-grating, that dipped a little into the waters, and effectually obstructed navigation, or rather ingress; where mountains occurred, the wall was made to climb their most rugged fronts, and in one instance reaches an elevation of five thousand feet above the sea. Wherever the nature of the ground rendered invasion easy, there the wall is double, treble, or as manifold as the necessity of the case would appear to demand.

The principal gates are fortified only on the side of China, and there protected by large flanking towers; at intervals of every hundred yards along the wall stand embattled towers, forty feet square at the base, thirty at the height of the platform of the wall, and having sometimes one, sometimes two stories, above it. The first gate, or first situated on an extensive plain, and memorable in history for the perfidy of its commandant, who was the first to invite the Tartars of Leauo-tong to invade his country. The other remarkable entrances are Hi-fong-keou, Tou-che-keou, Tchang-kia-keou, the two latter the accustomed routes of the Tartars who visit Peking, and Koo-pe-koou, through which the emperor Kang-hi generally passed to his summer-palace at Zehol in Tartary, and by which the embassy under Lord Macartney had the good fortune of being conducted to the same imperial residence.

Two views(*A third, taken by the draughtsman who accompanied the late expedition, is preserved at the Admiralty.) of the Great Wall have been carefully taken by European travellers: the one, at Koo-pe-koou, (Kou-pe-keou), which is given in the accompanying illustration; the other by the draughtsmen who attended the Dutch embassy under Isbrand Ydes in the year 1705. These embassies, representing different foreign courts, could not have conspired to deceive their respective countries in describing this colossal labour; and, even if they had, we have still the evidence of the French missionaries, who brought home a sketch of the whole line of vallation. This mass of evidence, this concurring testimony of different men in different ages, is more than sufficient to overturn the vain suspicions of some literary sceptics, who would conclude, from Marco Polo’s silence, that no such work as the Great Wall of China ever had a real existence. But the following extract, from an ambassadorial journal, affords an à priori proof(†Vide also the extract from Lord Jocelyn’s “Six Months with the Chinese Expedition,” in p. 31.) that Marco Polo’s silence is not to be ascribed to the non-existence of the wall, but to a very different cause – his never having travelled so far north. “A copy of Marco Polo’s route to China, taken from the Doge’s library at Venice, is sufficient to decide this question. By this route it appears that this traveller did not pass through Tartary to Peking, but that after having followed the usual track of the caravans as far to the eastward from Europe as Samarcand and Cashgar, he bent his course south-east across the river Ganges to Bengal; and, keeping to the southward of the Thibet mountains, reached the Chinese province of Chen-si, and through the adjoining province of Chan-si to the capital, without interfering with the line of the Great Wall.”

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