Great Wall of China

Chronicle of the construction of the Great Wall of China

The Great Wall is incontestable symbol of China. However, its history hides thousands of tragedies and still presents many chiaroscuro.

China, year 215 a. C. The country is under the yoke of its first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. His last great order: to build a huge defensive line against the nomads of the northern steppes, threatening the stability of the Empire with their incursions. In the place designated for this great wall, a man loaded with a huge block of stone behind him falls to the ground exhausted. An officer approaches and hits him hard, ordering him to get up. The man does not move. He has died a victim of exhaustion. Now we have to bury it. However, in this slave society, even the dead have their usefulness. The body of the unfortunate will serve as another element of the wall, will be sandwiched inside. This is the price demanded by the building of the Great Wall.

 Although not all historians agree, Qin Shi Huangdi is credited with having ordered the construction of the first Great Wall. Because, although the Great Wall is generally spoken of, there was not really one, but several. There were several periods of construction over a millennium and a half, and the layout of these walls was altered according to needs.

According to tradition, after unifying his empire in 221 a. C., the first emperor of China ordered one of his generals, Meng Tian, ​​to build a large fortification along his northern border. However, the creation of walls to protect his new empire was not a novelty in itself. In fact, Qin Shi Huangdi was inspired by a policy practiced in the past. The existence of defensive lines goes back several centuries before his reign, especially the previous period, that of the Combatant Kingdoms.

At that time the Chinese territory was divided into different states, allies or confronted with each other depending on the circumstances. These kingdoms built walls to defend themselves against their enemies, but, in addition, those located in the northern part built defenses to protect themselves from attacks by nomadic peoples of the northern steppes.

It was precisely in this last type of defense that the first emperor was set to raise his own defensive line against the attacks of the nomads. He ordered to build new walls, and in other cases take advantage of the existing ones and join them in such a way that a wide protective knot was formed. According to legend, this wall would measure ten thousand li. The li is a unit that is equivalent to approximately half a kilometer. That is, the Great Wall would reach a total length of 5,000 kilometers. And it is here that the tradition arises that associates the sovereign Qin with the Great Wall, but also with his cruelty, a fame that has been transmitted from generation to generation in China and that has made him a feared and hated. His own grave, composed of thousands of terracotta warriors, is another example of the power achieved by the first emperor. In the case of the Great Wall, it is said that he employed a million people, many of whom left their lives in the effort. Among those who worked in its construction were from soldiers to peasants forced to abandon their crops and move north to satisfy the Sovereign's wishes. In addition, there were those convicted by the State. Under Qin Shi Huangdi, China became a police state where any violation of the law was punishable by harsh punishment. No wonder there was a lot of workforce thanks to forced labor convictions.

The objective was to end the nomadic attacks, which had become very difficult to avoid due to the extreme mobility of the steppe riders.

The impulse of such a long barrier was aimed at ending nomadic attacks, which had become very difficult to avoid until then due to the extreme mobility of the steppe riders. Some historians have suggested that the consequences of the construction of the Great Wall were felt in places as distant as the West. Thus, nomadic peoples who could not cross it chose to go west. One of them would be that of the Xiongnu, whose descendants, among which are the Huns of Attila, reached Europe and contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Be that as it may, after the overthrow of the Qin in 206 a. C., later dynasties would continue their work repairing or extending the Great Wall and even altering the original circuit. However, it will not be until a millennium and a half later when this imposing defensive line gains special relevance again.

The true architects

If Qin Shi Huangdi is assigned the idea of ​​the Great Wall, the Ming were the ones who gave it the impressive dimensions that can now be seen when visiting it. Until the arrival of this dynasty, which remained in power from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, references to the Great Wall had been scarce in Chinese written works. It was cited by great historians such as Sima Qian and Ban Gu, although superficially. This would indicate that it was until then a defensive line without excessive importance and whose utility had diminished with the passage of time.

Under the Ming, on the other hand, the Great Wall regained the weight lost during the previous centuries. It was restored following the old foundations and was preserved in good condition throughout its thousands and thousands of kilometers. In fact, the wall of the Ming exceeds even the dimensions established in the times of the first emperor. It extends from Shanghaiguan, on the edge of the Gulf of Bohai, on the eastern coast of the country, to Jiayuguan, an impressive fortress that puts an end to the historic defense, already in the desert areas of Gansu province. In total, it covers 6,000 kilometers of Chinese territory. No wonder its original name in Chinese is changcheng, the "long wall." Its image has been associated with a huge dragon, the symbol of the imperial monarchy in China.

The new dynasty opted for a more resistant defensive system, so that its dimensions were also enlarged. In the central and eastern part, which is the most important and a beautiful example of Ming architecture, the height of the walls reaches almost 10 meters. Approximately 800 meters rise guard towers, and at various points along the Great Wall are fortifications, inhabited by those military units that were responsible for preventing enemy attacks and curbing any attempt to invade the Chinese territory.

Defense and politics

The construction of a wall that protected the northern border had first of all a defensive function. Its extension to the west by the Ming has a logical explanation. Qin Shi Huangdi dominated an empire smaller than that of the Ming, who inherited the territories conquered by previous dynasties. Now the danger came not only from the north, but also from the interior of Asia, from the regions located in the central area of ​​the continent.

The Ming carried out military campaigns beyond their borders to prevent offensives from neighboring towns and extend the borders of the Empire.

The construction of the wall was accompanied by measures such as surprise attacks on the northern towns. Like some previous dynasties, the Ming carried out military campaigns beyond their borders to prevent offensives from neighboring towns and extend the borders of the Empire. This was especially important in the north, where most of the partial or total invasions of the Chinese Empire came from in the centuries before the Ming. The dynasty had this fact in mind. The main enemies were the Mongols, who had dominated the throne of the country for almost a century.

But there were also political reasons in the building of the wall. During the reign of the third Ming Emperor, Yongle, at the beginning of the 15th century, the change of capital from the Empire from Nanjing (“the capital of the south”) to Beijing (or Beijing, the “capital of the north”) took place. Among the reasons for such a move was to control the northern border more closely, but this also implied a new concern: the proximity to the nomads led to the need to strengthen the defenses of Beijing and the Forbidden City, the residence of the Emperor, who was beginning to erect.

The period of greatest construction was, however, the Wanli era, on horseback between the 16th and 17th centuries. The Ming dynasty goes into decline from the second half of the XVI. Imperial spending is on the rise, but it is mostly the events abroad, with the increasingly fierce offensives of the Mongols and other nomadic peoples such as the Manchus, which propel the emperor to substantially strengthen the northern defensive line. Military spending skyrocketed and the consequences were important, because the cost left China in a delicate economic situation.

The offensives of the Mongols and other nomadic peoples such as the Manchus, prompted the emperor to substantially strengthen the northern defensive line.

In fact, it was not the nomads who brought down the Ming, but an internal revolt. Amidst the chaos, the Manchus, responding to the call of some Ming officers, crossed the Great Wall without problems and arrived in Beijing, where they crushed the rebellion. However, once in China, the Manchus did not withdraw, but instead took over the imperial throne. Thus was born the last Chinese dynasty, that of the Qing. The Great Wall had stopped making sense. In a curious outcome of fate, the Ming, those who had contributed most to making the Great Wall the most important defense of China, became the last properly Chinese dynasty.

Center of the world

Although its function was mainly military, the Great Wall was not only a defensive line, but also a sample of the Chinese attitude towards the outside world. For the Chinese, it marked the real frontier between civilization (represented by themselves) and the "barbarians", that is, those towns (Huns, Turks, Mongols ...) that threatened the stability of the Central Empire. This was the name that China received, whose rulers and inhabitants were considered the center of the world, of the only civilized world.

The Great Wall also served to fix the differences between two types of society: the one formed by a sedentary people who practiced agriculture and the nomad, which was mainly devoted to livestock.

Only for all these reasons it is explained that this magnificent construction has survived so long. Today, the Great Wall lacks the military utility of the past and is no longer the objective of the "barbarians", but of tourism, both foreign and domestic. The Chinese, in any case, show their pride in the ability of their ancestors to lift such a great work, often forgetting the pain it caused in them.

This article was published in issue 457 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute?