The Great Wall​—Monument to an Emperor’s Dream

IT WAS bound to happen one day. A man directed that a wall be built around his home. The man was the emperor. And his home? All of China! But who was this monarch? And why did he mobilize an entire kingdom to erect such a rampart?

To answer these questions, we must look to the period in Chinese history called the Warring States (403-222 B.C.E.). But remember, it is sometimes difficult to separate historic fact from legend. China was splintered into little kingdoms or states, and war erupted among them frequently. Adding to the chaos, the terrifying nomadic “barbarians” to the north were constantly seeking to plunder the yield of the fertile southern land. To protect themselves, many of the states became occupied with wall building.

The dust stirred up by these political struggles at first obscured the rise of a small Chinese state named Ch’in. But gradually this aggressive state, scorned by the cultured Chinese, conquered all but six of the quarreling kingdoms.

Then in the year 246 B.C.E., 13-year-old Prince Cheng assumed rulership of Ch’in. He envisioned an empire united under the rule of his iron hand, and he wasted no time in striking out against the other kingdoms. By 221 B.C.E., the last of the Chinese states fell to Ch’in’s army. At last, the king of Ch’in had attained what past Chinese kings had hardly dared to dream of. He was lord of China​—all of it! The jubilant Cheng dubbed himself with a new title: Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, or First Sovereign Emperor of the Ch’in dynasty.

Ch’in Shih Huang Ti was a man driven by his ambition to unite his empire and by his egocentric obsession with immortality. On the one hand, he was hailed as a political genius. He centralized his government, standardized the written Chinese language, reformed the monetary system, and built extensive highways originating at his capital city of Hsien Yang.

On the other hand, history also portrays a dark side to this man. Ch’in Shih Huang Ti was terrified of death. Several assassination attempts intensified his fear to the point of hysteria. So he commanded that imperial residences be built by the score, eventually numbering 270 around the capital alone, and connected with covered tunnels so the haunted emperor could move about secretly and sleep in a different place each night.

An Emperor’s Dream, an Empire’s Nightmare

Official Chinese history has it that, in 214 B.C.E., Ch’in Shih Huang Ti came upon the idea of drawing a curtain across the entire northern border of his empire. Imagine this emperor excitedly painting before his court engineers a glorious picture of his latest fantasy. ‘We will build a wall!’ he is said to have proclaimed. This wall was to be 24 feet high in many places, and at the top it was to be wide enough for eight soldiers to march abreast.a The burden of the incredible task fell to the tireless Meng T’ien, one of Ch’in’s most distinguished generals. Mobilizing his army, he drove the masses to fulfill his master’s dream.

Since the Wall was ostensibly built as a defense against the feared raiders to the north, watchtowers were needed to monitor the enemy’s movement along its length. So Meng T’ien set about constructing these giant sentry posts measuring 40 feet square at the base and tapering to 30 feet square at the top. They were placed two arrow shots apart so that archers would be able to defend every inch of the Wall from the towers. A total of 25,000 towers arose on hilltops and in valley entrances across the land.

Wherever possible, Meng T’ien utilized the walls and towers left behind by the previous states, linking them into what the Chinese later called Wan Li Ch’ang Ch’eng, or Ten Thousand Li Long Wall. (A Chinese li is about a third of a mile or half a kilometer.)b Actually, however, the Wall stretched approximately 1,850 miles. Succeeding generations added to the rampart, looping and extending it in many directions. The latest surveys by the Chinese government “tracing the remains of the wall in remote or mountainous areas have shown that the actual length is about 10,000 kilometers,” reports China Reconstructs.

It is believed that some portions of the Wall had foundations made with huge granite blocks 14 feet long by 4 feet wide and stone facing 2 to 5 feet thick, similar to construction methods employed by Ming dynasty engineers in the 16th century. The space within was filled with earth pounded down and topped with a roadway of bricks. As the Wall marched westward, it crossed a vast fertile plain where few stones were to be found. So the builders were forced to use what was available​—the fine yellow soil called loess. Some sections were constructed by piling up moistened loess in wooden frames. Other sections were built simply by chipping away blocks of the loess on either side, leaving a raised strip of soil as the Wall. Of these sections, little more than a heap of rubble remains today.

The Great Wall scaled China’s towering mountains, plunged into the lowest valleys, and marched across burning desert plains. In the east, bone-chilling winds and blinding snowstorms tormented the workers. To the west, merciless desert sun and stinging sandstorms oppressed them. Its construction bespeaks the agony of hundreds of thousands of laborers toiling almost beyond human limits. Those who did not work fast enough were tossed alive into foundation trenches together with others who perished from hunger and exposure. The Wall earned the grim distinction as “The Longest Cemetery on Earth,” as some 400,000 lay dead in its wake.

Among the casualties were many of China’s intellectuals who were branded as a threat to the political stability of the empire. Their feudal ideas and their criticism of the emperor’s sweeping reforms led to the infamous ‘burning of the books and burying of scholars’ in 213 B.C.E., which blackened the name of Ch’in Shih Huang Ti for posterity. To this day, ballads bemoan the loss of life resulting from the Wall’s construction. A nightmare indeed!

A Dynasty Crumbles

But a nagging question remains. Why would an emperor deliberately exhaust his empire in such a monumental pursuit? On the surface, it might appear that protection was the reason. And it is true that the nomads were effectively repelled, at least for a while. But recall for a moment Ch’in’s kingdom at its zenith​—a mighty war machine triumphant in conquest over all within its reach. Where could it next channel its energies? Perhaps the emperor was in greater fear of this vast, restless army than he was of the nomads.

The building of the Wall, nonetheless, proved to be a devastating blow to the empire. South of the Wall, rebel armies began to grow. Peasant revolts erupted because of the crushing tax burden from the emperor’s extravagant projects. The man who had struggled so desperately for immortality died in 210 B.C.E. The ensuing power struggle left the empire crumbling in ruins. The mighty Ch’in dynasty had lasted a mere 14 years, from 221-207 B.C.E. Yet, that brief rule had witnessed some of China’s most sweeping events.

As Ch’in was unable to evade man’s greatest enemy, death, so, too, little remains of his original Wall, to pay tribute to the millions who slaved to fulfill an emperor’s dream. The impressive sections of the Wall that have endured and are viewed by tourists today were built in the 16th century by Ming dynasty Emperor Wan Li.

[Footnotes]

[Box on page 27]

How Great Is the Great Wall?

◻ The original Wall when stretched out would reach from the Pacific over the Rockies to the Mississippi or from the tip of Brittany in France through northern Europe to Moscow.

◻ The Great Wall contained enough material to build a wall eight feet high and three feet thick completely around the world once at the equator​—a distance of 25,000 miles.

[Map on page 26]

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MONGOLIA

CHINA

Jiayuguan Pass

Lintao

Yanmenguan

Shanhaiguan Pass

KOREA

■​—The Great Wall during the Quinshihuang rule

●​—The Great Wall of the Ming dynasty