The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is exactly what the name implies - it is a literal wall over a thousand miles long. That's equal to the distance from Miami, Florida to Boston, Massachusetts or San Antonio, Texas! This wall runs up and over hills that look impossible to cross, and yet hundreds and thousands of men built a solid extended fortress over them, using nothing but their bare hands, animals and crude tools. No cranes, no CAT's, no bulldozers. If one stands on a hilltop, one can see the wall stretching off into the distance for miles and miles, zigzagging this way and that until it disappears into the distance.

Lush green vegetation has all but hidden many sections of the wall, while in other parts of China, the wall has been buried beneath decades of blowing sand. Yet, this great endeavor still stands today, a testament to determination, design and thousands of years of upkeep and maintenance.

The Chinese call the Great Wall 'Wan-Li Qang-Qeng', which means '10,000 Li Long Wall'. In China, 10,000 'Li' is a measurement of distance, which in metric converts to about 5,000 kilometers in length. In the United States the distance is equal to 3,105 miles.

The wall is over 2,000 years old. Building on it began during the reign of China's first Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi around 221 B.C. But even before that, various province leaders had erected portions of walls all through Northern China in an effort to protect people and property from a group of marauding Mongol nomads. The times were precarious, and Asians were terrorized not only by Mongols and invaders from the Tsongnoo tribes of Northern China. Genghis Khan, the most famous Mongol of them all, wreaked havoc for years. The first emperor of the Qin Dynasty ordered that the pieces of walls be connected, strengthened and fortified with towers to keep out warring invaders. Gates were built into the wall to allow travelers and merchants to come and go, but guards and troops stationed on towers strategically positioned kept the invaders at bay.

Along the length of most of the Great Wall, the walls are of uniform size, being around twenty-five feet high. Forty-foot towers are spaced along the wall to help guard it. The wall is no wider than a common modern highway today, and was built to allow two wagons to be able to pass each other without difficulty. The Great Wall is one of the world's largest man-made structures, constructed by hand and made of rocks, stones, crude bricks, and even packed earth at some points. During the course of its construction, over 600,000 people helped build it.

Different rulers of different dynasties and well into the modern age have repaired the Great Wall over much of its lifetime. One of the most extreme repairs took place during the beginning of the Ming dynasty in 1368, an endeavor that lasted for two hundred years.

One of the most famous sections of the Great Wall is the Mutianyu section, found in an area northeast of Beijing. It has towers like those found on ancient castles in Europe that were used for watching for the enemy. Some of the towers in this section of the wall are as close as 50 meters apart, making it one of the strongest and most well defended sections of the entire wall. Tourists to Beijing flock to Badaling, a short distance north of the capital city, to see the wall there. On a misty day, the mountaintops and the winding wall are shrouded in mist, offering modern day visitors glorious views.

Originally, it was thought that the wall was around 3,000miles long. Late in 2002, Chinese archaeologists discovered an earlier section of the wall that covered almost 500 miles across today's counties of Lushan, Yexian, Fangcheng and Nanzhao, in southwest Henan Province. This portion of the wall is so old it was built with stones. A different section was also discovered in northwestern China, after having been buried beneath sand over the centuries. The section is on the southern slope of Helan Mountain in the Ningxia region, near the city of Yinchuan. Archaeologists believe this section of the wall was built around 1531. A year earlier, in early 2001, Chinese archaeologists found yet another section of the wall in Lop Nur, also in northwest China. With the newly found additions, the Great Wall is almost 7,200 kilometers, or 4,471 miles in length.

Many historians, both Chinese and those throughout the world, now believe that many portions of the wall were built to mark territory. The first section of the Great Wall is believed to have taken 10 years to build, which made progress slow at about one mile per day. During its 'best years', the wall contained thousands of little towers that required more than a million men to guard them. Today, the Great Wall is over 6,000 kilometers long. It extends from the Jiayu Pass in Gansu Province in the west to the Yalu River in Liaoning Province in the east.

Emperors and other leaders of the Qin, Han, Sui and Ming dynasties all had a hand in the building of one of the world's modern wonders. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) listed the Great Wall as a World Heritage site in 1987, and thousands and thousands of people travel from all over the world to see it.

The structure stands as a silent testimony to a different time, a time when no one was safe and people were forced to band together to defend themselves against marauders. Times have changed since the days the Great Wall was built, but the struggles of our ancestors should never be forgotten.