The Great Wall of China looms in the distance, meandering over mountain tops and deep ravines. This work of gigantic proportion will leave you gaping in awe. It’s majestic. It’s amazing and inches out emotions that can leave you with goosebumps.
The feelings mutual as our chartered bus enters the car-park at the foot of the Great Wall outside Beijing City.
From the comfort of our heated bus, the wall looms straight up the mountain side. The setting sun hits the left wall pointing out its northerly climb.
Many things have been written about the wall. And like sevens rugby and the maestro Waisale Serevi, writers have run out of apt descriptions and analogies for this wonder of humankind.
First impression
I’d hoped to get a chance to visit this great wonder.
The first thing that gets to you is the immensity of the construction work. The terrain is inhospitable for such work. But that’s just part of what makes this huge structure a mammoth reminder of the architectural skills and knowledge of the ancestors of the Chinese people.
The Chinese people say you have not lived a full life if you have not climbed the Great Wall, which is probably why many Chinese family groups are amongst foreign tourists making this journey to the wall.
A sign along the Great Wall reads: ‘He who doesn’t reach the Great Wall isn’t a true man’. It’s supposed to be a line spoken by Mao Tse Tung, the Chinese leader.
That’s when your imagination runs wild, doing flips over nagging questions.
I’d read somewhere that the wall could be seen from the moon.
Popular beliefs ranging from Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoons from the 1930s, which claimed that the Great Wall is “the mightiest work of man, the only one that would be visible to the human eye from the moon,” to Richard Halliburton’s 1938 book Second Book of Marvels which makes a similar claim, have persisted.
I later learn the Great Wall is a maximum 9.1m (30 ft) wide and is about the same colour as the soil surrounding it in most places and based on the optics of resolving power (distance versus the width of the iris: a few millimetres for the human eye, metres for large telescopes) an object of reasonable contrast to its surroundings some 70 miles in diameter would be visible to the unaided eye from the moon, whose average distance from Earth is 384,393 km (238,857 miles).
The width of the Great Wall from the moon is the same as that of a human hair viewed from two miles away. I discover that to see the wall from the moon would require vision 17,000 times better than normal.
Not surprisingly, no lunar astronaut has ever claimed seeing the Great Wall from the moon.
Piece of history
The Great Wall of China, built to keep China’s horse-riding neighbours at bay, extends from Heilongjiang province by Korea to China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang.
According to recorded history, the Great Wall of China was not constructed as a single project. It is made up of numerous construction projects that were begun at different times, during different dynasties and in different locations.
The wall as it known today is predominantly a product of the Ming Dynasty, which both repaired and rebuilt older sections, and expanded the reach of the structure. The Ming Dynasty structure can be seen from Hebei province to Gansu province.
Beyond Gansu province the wall becomes a series of watchtowers that stretch into Xinjiang province and the Taklamakan desert.
The initial fortifications and the subsequent wall were both constructed to slow the advance of invading forces that depended on cavalry-mounted horsemen expert at using the bow and arrow.
I read a note that suggested imperial governments feared the possibility of disloyal Chinese bringing military technology or other kinds of information to the northern nomadic tribes. As a result, the construction of the wall was equal parts protection from outside invaders and an attempt to keep the Chinese in China.
The Great Wall represented one solution to imperial China’s most long term foreign policy problem. This problem rose from the need by China, as a sedentary, agricultural empire to respond to invasions by nomadic, tribal peoples. Initially, this concern came to prominence with the rise of the Xiongnu Empire, which was based in present-day Mongolia.
The initial fortifications began in the 3rd century BCE, during the Qin Dynasty (221- 206 BCE).
The fortifications begun during the Qin dynasty were augmented and expanded during the Han dynasty (202 BCE- 220 CE) that followed. The final, and most comprehensive, period of construction took place during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE). The Ming Dynasty extended and strengthened the Great Wall. Early Ming rulers greatly feared the Mongols, whom they had toppled in 1368.
Length of the Wall
I’m told the answer to the question of the length of the wall is a complicated one.
My friend Fang reminds me that the latest construction took place in the Ming Dynasty and the length built was over 6000 kilometres.
This is the one often referred to when we talk about the Great Wall.
However, if you include all the walls built in different dynasties around China, the total length will exceed 50,000 kilometres.
According to a rough estimate of the bricks, stones, cubic metres of earth used to make the wall during the Ming Dynasty, it is believed a wall – one metre thick and five meters high, can be built to encircle the earth.
If the same amount of material is used to pave a highway five metres wide and 35 cm thick, it can encircle the earth three or four times. If the total length of the Great Wall built in successive Chinese dynasties is added, it can encircle the earth 30 – 40 times.
The statistics were mind blowing. For me, it finally made sense why former United States President Richard Nixon said, “Only a great nation can build such a magnificent Great Wall.”
He spoke that line on February 24, 1972. He’d walked the Great Wall.
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