The Great Wall of China is made of several walls that are parallel to each other. They stretch over 13500 miles, which is more than half the Earth's circumference. Did these walls actually protect China against the outside world?
The answer depends on how you define the wall's successes and failures. The Great Wall of China was built as a masterpiece of defensive architecture, and while Chinese troops controlling the barriers helped to prevent invaders, it was not impervious. Sometimes it helped protect China, and other times it didn't.
It was a display of China's wealth, architectural expertise and engineering prowess. The wall has been adopted as a patriotic symbol by the Communist Party.
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The Great Wall project began in earnest after the unification of China's warring states in 221 B.C., but it wasn't until 700 B.C. that the Chinese began building walls in the country's far north. He ordered peasants to connect forts to protect his empire against the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian region. The emperors fortified the wall with beacon towers, which could be lit to send messages about raids. The wall began to look like it today.
Valuable time for China's forces to mobilize was bought by the wall. The Great Wall of China was used to lure enemy troops into compromising situations, according to the book "The Great Wall of China From History to Myth" by Arthur Waldron, a professor of international relations in the department of history at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1428, a Chinese general forced the Mongol armies to the wall, pinning them down without an escape route and defeating them.
The Great Wall did not guarantee safety. The wall was initially used to bulk up defenses where the geography was less challenging for armies to traverse. The end of an entire dynasty of rulers was brought about by one of the wall's most notorious failures.
Julia Lovell, a professor of modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck University of London, said that it had offered little or no protection to the greatest wall of all, the Ming Dynasty. The gates were opened to let the Manchus into China by a Chinese general. The Manchus found the Qing dynasty in 1644.
The Great Wall was seen in China as a strategic folly because of its failure.
For a long time, this negative perception persisted. "Ordinary people had to provide labor over many years to construct it, and it became a powerful symbol of the emperor's imperial oppression," said Louise Edwards, professor of Chinese history at the University of New South Wales in Australia. The nationalist revolution in 1912 gave it a new lease on life, as it established a republic. In the absence of a monarch, the new leaders were looking for ways to unite a country with many different cultures. They were looking for symbols to create a new national identity.
The Great Wall, built by China's people, was a perfect example of what could be achieved through unity. It had a bit of a PR change. The same narrative was used by the communists when they took over. The success of the wall is a symbolic value. She told Live Science that the symbolism is important. "This is the real and lasting power."
Live Science published the original article.
