The Great Wall is one of the great wonders of the world, and nothing can prepare you for the heady sensation of actually looking at the Great Wall as it winds through miles of steep hills and rugged countryside.

The Great Wall of China is a Chinese fortification built from the 3rd century BC until the beginning of the 17th century, in order to protect the various dynasties from raids by Huns, Mongols, Turkic peoples, and other nomadic tribes coming from areas in modern-day Mongolia. Several walls were built since the 3rd century BC, but the famous one is built between 220 BC and 200 BC by the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, which was located much further north than the current Great Wall of China built during the Ming Dynasty, and little of it remains.

The Great Wall is the world's longest man-made structure, stretching over a formidable 6,352 km (3,948 miles), from Shanhai Pass on the Bohai Sea in the east to Lop Nur in the southeastern portion of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The Gradual Evolvement of the Great Wall

As a defensive wall on the northern border, the Great Wall was built and maintained by several dynasties at different times in Chinese history. There have been five major walls:

1. Qin Dynasty Great Wall (built around 208 B.C.)
2. Han Dynasty Great Wall (built in 1st century B.C.)
3. Sui Dynasty Great Wall (built in 7th century)
4. Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period Great Wall (built in the period of 1138 A.D. – 1198 A.D.)
5. Hongwu Emperor to Wanli Emperor of the Ming Dynasty Great Wall (built in the period of 1368 A.D. – 1640 A.D.)

This wall was not constructed as a single endeavor, but was mostly the product of joining several regional walls built by the Warring States Period. The walls that were linked together at this time consisted of rammed earth with watch towers built at regular intervals. It was located much further north than the current Great Wall with its eastern end at today's North Korea. Very little of this first wall remains.

The government ordered people to work on the wall, and workers were under perpetual danger of being attacked by brigands. The construction was supervised under the command of the Qin general Meng Tian. Construction of the wall involved the mobilization of vast amounts of labor, including forced conscription of criminals, prisoners of war, and political dissidents. Because many people died while building the wall, it has obtained the gruesome title, "longest cemetery on Earth" or "the long graveyard". Possibly as many as one million workers died building the wall, though the true numbers cannot be determined now. The people that died were not buried in the wall, since decomposing bodies would have weakened the structure.

The later long walls built by the Han, the Sui, and the Ten Kingdoms period were also built along the same design. They were made of rammed earth with multi-story watch towers built every few miles. These walls have also largely vanished into the surrounding landscape, eroded away by wind and rain.

In military terms, these walls were more frontier demarcations than defensive fortifications of worth. Certainly Chinese military strategy did not revolve around holding the wall; instead, it was the cities themselves that were fortified.

The Great Wall which most tourists visit today was built during the Ming Dynasty, starting around the year 1368 and lasting till around 1640. Work on the wall started as soon as the Ming took control of China but, initially, walls were not the Ming's preferred response to raids out of the north. That attitude began to change in response to the Ming's inability to defeat the Oirats|Oirat war leader [[Esen Taiji]] in the period of 1449 to 1454. A huge Ming Dynasty army with the Zhengtong Emperor at its head was annihilated in battle and the Emperor himself held hostage in 1449.

Apparently the real focus on wall building started as a result of Altan Khan's siege of Beijing which took place one hundred years later in 1550. The Ming, faced with the choice of trying to defeat the Mongols with direct military force, chose instead to build a massive defensive barrier to protect China. As a result, most of the Ming Great Wall was built in the period of 1560 to 1640. This new wall was built on a grand scale with longer lasting materials (solid stone used for the sides and the top of the Wall) than any wall built before.

The Ming Dynasty Great Wall starts on the eastern end at Shanhai Pass, near Qinhuangdao, in Hebei Province, next to Bohai Gulf. Spanning nine provinces and 100 counties, the final 500 km (~300 mi) have all but turned to rubble, and today it ends on the western end at the historic site of Jiayuguan Pass (also called Jiayu Pass) (嘉峪关), located in northwest Gansu Province at the limit of the Gobi Desert and the oases of the Silk Road. Jiayuguan Pass was intended to greet travelers along the Silk Road. Even though The Great Wall ends at Jiayu Pass, there are many watchtowers (烽火台) extending beyond Jiayu Pass along the Silk Road. These towers communicated by smoke to signal invasion.

In 1644, the Kokes Manchus crossed the Wall by convincing an important general Wu Sangui to open the gates of Shanhai Pass and allow the Manchus to cross.  Legend has it that it took three days for the Manchu armies to pass. After the Manchu conquered China, the Wall was of no strategic value, mainly because the Manchu extended their political control far to the north.

An Attractive Place of Interest

Today, the Great Wall has become a well-known place of interest in China. In 1987, the Wall was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is considered by many as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.

Setting out from Beijing, the most popular destination for visiting the Great Wall is Badaling. Both trains and buses go to the northwest of the city proper in a deep mountain-flanked gully 15 kilometers long. In summer, the peaks here are covered with brilliant stretches of leaves and luxuriant flowers. As early as the 13th century, the area was known for its beauty, and was listed as one of the"Eight Great Sights of Yanjing." The name "Juyong" first appeared in the huainanzi, a philosophical work from the second century BC, in the following annotation: "The Juyong Pass is one of the nine great passes in the country."

To the west of the Juyong Pass is a white marble structure called the Cloud Platform (Yuntai), which was built in 1345 to serve as the foundation for a set of three stone pagodas built at the command of Emperor Huizong, the last ruler of the Yuan Dynasty. At this time, the structure was known as the Pagoda Bridge (Guojieta). After the pagodas were destroyed some time around the fall of the Yuan Dynasty (1368), the Great Peace Temple (Tai‘ ansi) was built to replace them. But the temple was burned down in 1702 during the reign of Emperor kangxi.


The Cloud Platform is pierced by a hexagonal arched gateway. Both the ceiling and facades are covered with Buddhist carvings, including depictions of the Four Heavenly Kings in relief executed with great detail and expressiveness. Texts of Dharani sutras and an inscription entitled "A Record of Charitable and Pious Pagoda Building" carved in six languages -- Lantsha (Nepalese Sanskirt), Tibetan, Phagspa Mongolian, Uygur, Western Xia and Han -- are valuable for the study of philology. The inner roof of the arch is covered with mandala patterns and Buddha images surrounded by flowers, all fine examples of Yuan Dynasty craftsmanship. （Source: wikilib, china.org.cn）