[Colin Glassey] The Great Wall of China
I've read a huge book of photos and text about the so-called Great Wall of China. Its history is interesting and quite different from what is commonly thought.
At the begining, the Great Wall was built by the first Emperor of China Shih Huang Ti. This was a very long earthen rampart which streched from the coast of China (near the Manchurian border) far into Asia, roughly following the border of what is called Mongolia. In addition to the earthen "wall", watch towers were built at regular intervals. The military value of this wall was nearly non-existant. The nomads north of the wall could ride over it with ease. The watch towers could be burned and destroyed individually. What the wall says about China is far more important than what it did for the Chinese.
What the wall said was that this is the northern border of China. Beyond this point is land we don't care about. Only the nomads, uncivilized barbarians lived north of the wall.
Various walls of earth were built by later Emperors. Time and the wind eroded them down as the decades and centuries passed. China was attacked frequently by the northern barbarians. The walls and the watch towers may have been more useful than nothing, maybe they were even worth the money. What is curious to me is that the walls kept on being built even after it was clear they kept failing to keep the barbarians out of China.
Why didn't the Chinese figure out a better solution than just rebuilding the wall every 100 years? The Chinese strategy for dealing with the northern barbarians fell into three categories: 1) bribe them to stay away from Chinese territory; 2) attack them with military forces; 3) try to defend their lands once the barbarians launched an attack over the wall. The obvious strategy which occured to the Russians was to just take control over everything. The truth is, you don't have to go too much farther north before you get into Siberia. And you don't have to go to much further into Siberia before you run into land which just doesn't support anything other than tiny bands of hunters. The Inuit people of northern Siberia simply cannot become a military threat. So, in order for China to have eliminated the problem of the northern barbarians, they just needed to exert political and military control over a region which is now called Mongolia and Manchuria. It is worth pointing out that two of the last three rulers of China came from Mongolia and southern Manchuria.
The story of the last great wall is quite interesting. The last great wall is the one everyone thinks of because (a) large sections of it are still standing and (b) it is made of stone and looks very photogenic. However, this had led people to false assumption that all the great walls of China looked like the last one (they didn't).
The story is this: the Ming Empire (the last Chinese dynasty actually run by ethnic Chinese) had a problem with the Mongols. A large, powerful army of Mongols had crossed over the Yangtse River and occupied the Ordos plain. Nominally this was part of China (it was on the Chinese side of the Great Wall). The first response by the Ming was military, they sent a large army against the Mongols. It was defeated and the Emperor leading the army was killed.
At this point the Ming made a fateful choice, they decided to build a new wall, different from earlier walls, and built along the new defacto frontier, walling off the Ordos plain from the rest of China. The new wall was expensive to build, really expensive. By the time it was completed (around 1650) the Ming were bankrupt and popular discontent swelled into a revolt which controlled the capital. The leader of the Chinese army stationed on the side of the wall next to the Manchu was ordered back to Peking. He made a deal with the friendly Manchu warriors and so they marched with his army in a combined force back to Peking. The Manchu proved to be much more clever than the Chinese and quickly seized control over Peking and soon, they controlled the entire nation.
The net result of the great Ming wall was: they kept the Mongols pinned in the Ordos, they bankrupted themselves, they provoked an internal revolt, and shortly after the wall was finished they lost control to another barbarian tribe, the Manchu. The Manchu ruled China for the next 250 years.
There is no question in my mind that the final Ming wall was better than the previous walls. But was it worth the cost? Was it the wise thing to spend their resources on? The events of the day strongly suggest the answer to that is no. Still, the remains of the wall which can still be seen today are most impressive. Thus the folly of kings becomes tourist attractions of the modern world.
Still, the deep question remains: why build walls in the first place? Why didn't the Chinese repond to the threat of the northern barbarians in a better fashion? Why did the Chinese keep losing battles to the barbarians?
Certainly the Europeans lost battles to the barbarians. The Roman Empire was destroyed by barbarian invaders. 600 years later the east European armies were slaughtered by the Mongol army, the same Mongols which had conqured northern China and most of the rest of Asia over the previous 20 years. But that was the end of the barbarians dominance over Europe. From then on, the Europeans were not beaten by the barbarians.
Unlike the Chinese, the Europeans made use of gun powder to make better and better weapons. Unlike the Chinese (who invented gun powder but then used it for nothing more than fire works), the Europeans made better and better cannons, then shrank them into hand held cannons called muskets. The barbarians with their supurb horsemanship and skill at killing were not able to fight against small light cannons and muskets. If a European army had attacked the Mongols in the Ordos plain in 1600, there is no doubt in my mind that it would have defeated them and driven the remainder over the river back into Mongolia.
So, the Chinese under the Ming, faced with barbarian threats and the recent history of conquest by the Mongols, responded not by military innovation, but with the same old army they fielded 1,000 years earlier. When that army was defeated they built a huge new stone wall and hid behind it. Curiously, the Chinese were aware that gun powder could be used for more dangerous weapons but they refused to try and copy the Europeans. They litterally turned their backs on more advanced weapons technology and as a result, they were conqured. Oddly enough, at around that same time, Japan was also turning its back on advanced weapons (muskets and cannon which the Hideyoshi and Tokugawa used to take over all of Japan) but the Japanese did not suffer the same fate as China. Thanks, I'm sure, to the fact that Japan was an island and the barbarians had no fleets.
12:58:02 PM 
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