Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Great Wall of China (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. It's one of the longest and largest structures ever built, and it was designed to defend one of the oldest and greatest civilizations on the planet. And for centuries, it did just that. And for some centuries, it didn't do that at all. Some people have claimed that you can see it from space, and it's one of the most visited tourist attractions on Earth. Learn more about the Great Wall of China, one of the planet's greatest man-made wonders, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:56 It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. To understand why the Great Wall of China was built, you first have to understand the geography of China. The historic center of China and of Chinese civilization has been in what is today the eastern third of China. This region of China has had the vast majority of the population for all of its history, and this region is relatively flat and extremely fertile. The agricultural production of this region is why China has historically had such high populations and a high population density.

Starting point is 00:01:39 Even thousands of years ago, when populations on Earth were much lower, China still usually had the highest population in the world because this region was so productive. China has often been divided by an imaginary line called the Hu line. It stretches from the city of Haihu in the north near the border of Russia to Tengchong in the south, which is close to the border of Myanmar. The western side of this line has about two-thirds of the land of modern-day China, but only 6% of the population. The eastern side of the line has 94% of the population and almost all of the agriculture. The eastern side of that line is what the defense of China has always been about. Now, consider how China has historically viewed its defenses. To the east, you have the Pacific

Starting point is 00:02:23 Ocean. The only real island off the coast of China is Taiwan, which traditionally never has really been that populated. Japan is further to the north and lies across the sea from Korea and Siberia. The Philippines is further south, but it lies across the sea from Southeast Asia, so the coast of China has never really been a source of threat. To the south, you have the south, you have the Himalayan Mountains and the Himalayan foothills. Outside of a small area near the coast on the border of Vietnam, there really hasn't been much threat to China from the south. There have been a war's fault with Vietnam, but it was mostly China invading Vietnam, not the other way around. The Himalayas were, for all practical purposes, impassable, so the major empires in China

Starting point is 00:03:02 and Southeast Asia never really posed a threat to China. Despite being two of the largest ancient civilizations, most of the contact between China and India occurred by sea or via the Silk Road, not over the mountains. To the west, you had a region that was mostly desert and unpopulated. What is today the region of Xinjiang contains the Taklimakhan Desert, and beyond that is the Tianchan Mountains. So basically, you had an enormous region to the east, south, and west where China, for the most part, didn't have to worry about invasion. The real threat came from the north. For centuries, China was under threat from nomadic peoples from the Eurasian steppes who found China to be a lucrative target for raiding an invasion. You did have the Gobi Desert,

Starting point is 00:03:42 but the gobi wasn't an impassable barrier. So starting about 2,700 to 2,500 years ago, before China became a single unified empire, many of the regional warlords began building walls to stop raiders from coming from the north. Here is where I should probably address the first misconception about the Great Wall of China. There is no single Great Wall of China,

Starting point is 00:04:04 as there isn't a single wall that stretches across China. It would be more accurate to say there are great walls of China, plural. If you see a map of the Great Wall of China, you'll see several lines of walls, often hundreds of miles apart from each other. These first walls were built in a piecemeal fashion. They didn't necessarily look like the well-constructed stone and brick structures that you've probably seen photos of. Most of these very early constructions were made with rammed earth, not bricks, or with stones that they found scattered about. The oldest existing segment of the wall is known as the Wall of Shi, which dates back to the year 441 BC.

Starting point is 00:04:40 Many of these very early walls were not necessarily facing north to keep out nomadic invaders. Each kingdom would build walls to keep out other kingdoms as well as people from the steps. That all changed when the first Chinese emperor, Chin, came to power in 221 BC and established the Qin dynasty. He did two things with respect to the Great Wall. First, he dismantled all of the walls which were built between the various Chinese states, which prevented easy movement within the new empire. Second, he connected all of the northward-facing walls, so it became one contiguous wall. The wall was never intended to be a permanent border.

Starting point is 00:05:16 One of the philosophies of the Chin and later dynasties was build and move on. The wall during this period stretched for about 3,000 miles. After the fall, the Chin dynasty, the wall fell into disrepair. And it went through a series of periods where new sections of the wall would be built, extended, old parts of the wall would be rebuilt, and then it would be ignored and fall into disrepair again. Different imperial dynasties had totally different approaches to the wall. The Han dynasty in the second century extended the wall to what became its greatest extent, and it was also extensively rebuilt during the Sway dynasty.

Starting point is 00:05:49 The Tang and Song dynasties did relatively little with respect to repairing and expanding the wall. The Great Wall eventually failed to serve its primary purpose during the Mongol invasions. The invasion of China by the Mongols, which began with Jenghis Khan and was completed by his grandson Kubla Khan, established the Yuan dynasty, which was the first dynasty of foreign rulers of China. The Mongols didn't really care about the wall when they were in power, as they controlled both sides of it. It served absolutely no purpose when they ruled China. The only thing they used it for were some military outposts along the wall, which stationed troops that guarded the Silk Road. Oddly enough, none of the European visitors who traveled to China during this period, and there were many, mentioned the Great Wall.

Starting point is 00:06:30 After the Mongols fell from power, they were replaced by the Ming Dynasty in the late 14th century. The Ming's, having just lived through a century of Mongol rule, and still engaging in military conflict with the Mongols, set to wall building like no dynasty since the Han, over a thousand years earlier. Their wall building began in earnest in 1474. The Ming Dynasty wall was by far the best version of the wall which had been built. If you ever visit China today and go see the Great Wall of China, you will almost be certainly visiting a section which was built during the Ming dynasty. The Ming were more concerned about defense than they were about expansion, and the wall was a big part of their strategy. This wall was

Starting point is 00:07:09 built with brick instead of rammed earth and stones. They built a network of 25,000 guard towers along the wall, which were manned and evenly spaced along the wall. They also created six gates in the wall in major passes for trade and commerce to pass through. All the gates were heavily fortified with major military installations. Despite all the effort that the Ming Dynasty put into the wall, ultimately it was armies from Manchuria which came through the wall to cause the fall of the dynasty. They established the Qing dynasty in the mid-16th century. From here, the era of wall building was mostly over. The primary purpose of the wall for the Qing dynasty wasn't keeping the Mongols out of China so much as it was keeping the Han Chinese out of

Starting point is 00:07:48 Manchuria. With the advent of more powerful artillery and mechanized warfare, the Great Wall of China became as obsolete as a defensive structure as other city walls and castles were around the world. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Great Wall became a symbol of China, became one of the top things to see for people who were visiting the country, especially the region around Beijing. In 1933, a military event called the Defense of the Great Wall, also known as the First Battle of Hopay, was fought between the Republic of China and the Imperial Japanese Army.

Starting point is 00:08:18 It was a precursor to the Second World War, which would start in China just four years later. Parts of the wall around Beijing were repaired in the 1950s, which is the place that most tourists visit. However, large sections of the wall were destroyed in the 1960s as people used the wall as material for building or tore it down to build roads and other structures. However, by the 1980s, the wall was once again protected and repaired as its value as a tourist attraction and as a symbol of national pride was once again recognized. Today, the Great Wall of China gets over 50 million

Starting point is 00:08:48 visitors per year, both foreign and domestic. Nonetheless, over a third of the wall has been completely destroyed. The wall varies greatly in quality, depending. depending on the location. In some parts, it's very well preserved, and in others it's become completely overgrown with grass, and it looks like a long snaking hill. Today, you can visit the point where the Great Wall of China meets the sea in the town of La Long Tu. It's not the eastern most point of the wall per se, however, as there are segments which go northeast of that point. The westernmost point of the Great Wall is found in Jaiu Pass, which is out in the western desert. There were sections of the Han Dynasty Wall, which went even further west, but those are long gone.

Starting point is 00:09:26 The wall near Jaiyu Pass just abruptly ends, and it's rather odd because anyone at that point could easily just go around it. You might have heard that the Great Wall of China was the only man-made object which is visible from space. This has been proven to be mostly false. While the wall is very long, it's far too narrow to be seen in most places. There are, however, a few sections of the wall that are straight that stick out from the surroundings that can be seen. However, you need to know exactly where to look. There are also many such roads and other man-made structures which can be seen from orbit if you also know exactly where to look. In its totality, all of the walls which make up the Great Wall of China, built over a period of about 2,500 years, made by over a million people over that time period, constitutes the largest structure ever created by humanity.

Starting point is 00:10:16 Regardless if it's measured by length, total mass of building material, or the time it took to build, there is nothing in the world that is quite like. The Great Wall of China. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise

Starting point is 00:10:49 is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Great Wall of China (Encore)

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