In Our Time - The Great Wall of China

Episode Date: April 29, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Great Wall of China.The Great Wall is not a single Wall. It is not visible from space, contrary to popular belief, as it is much too thin. But it remains a spectacular architectural and historical phenomenon.The Great Wall's military importance, and its symbolic power, have varied widely in its long existence, as its place in Chinese life has shifted with the country's history. It was initially constructed at the command of the first Emperor, from 221 BC, and was a combination of the various protective walls that had been built by the smaller states which he had conquered and merged to form China. The original Wall was made of pounded earth, and in places the wind-carved remains of this two thousand year old construction are still visible. But the Wall which is familiar to us today is the work of the Ming Dynasty, and its vast programme of reinforcement - prompted by a renewed threat from the Mongols in the north. In the 17th century, amazed Jesuits sent back reports to Europe about the Wall, and ever since it has held a powerful place in the imagination of the West. Some scholars argue that this in turn has shaped the modern Chinese appreciation of their astounding inheritance.Julia LovellLecturer in Chinese History at Birkbeck College, University of LondonRana MitterProfessor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of OxfordFrances WoodHead of the Chinese Section at the British LibraryPRODUCER: PHIL TINLINE.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Great Wall of China is not a single wall, but made it for many smaller walls begun in the 6th century BC. It's never been simply a national border,

and contrary to popular belief, it isn't visible from space. Nevertheless, this astonishing fortification which snakes for thousands of miles through deserts and mountains to the sea has been a powerful symbol in Chinese life for millennia. It was initially joined up at the command of the First Emperor in the wake of his creation of China in 221 BC. But the wall which is most familiar to us today

is larger the work of the Ming Dynasty, 1368 to 1644. Over the centuries, the wall has come to symbolise strength in unity, failure and longevity. It remains a potent image long after, after its military uses fell away. With me to discuss the Great Wall of China at Julia Lovell, lecturer in Chinese history at Birkbeck College University of London,

Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford, and Francis Wood, head of the Chinese section at the British Library. Francis Wood, if you travelled at high speed down the length of the Great Wall today, what would you see? You'd see in an extraordinary variation

from west to east. If you started in the West, where the Great Wall tumbles down into the sea. From there moving westward slowly, you would see a great fortification of greyish blue brick, which it's between seven and nine metres high. It's about five metres wide at the top so that five horsemen can ride along in parallel.

It has watchtowers which stick up every couple of miles or so. And it covers, really, it just snakes over the tops of the green mountains of North China. Sometimes you stand on the wall and you can see more walls further north. You snake across, going westwards through the centre of northern China. Sometimes there you'd find the wall made of what's called tiger skin brick, which is when they use a kind of crazy paving of stone with white lime infill and above you get the grey brick crenellations. Then you get, as you go further east and start getting towards the sort of deserts of Central Asia, the wall changes colour considerably

instead of being blue-grey it becomes yellow and it's built there of tamped earth not brick mainly and you can still see pieces of parts of the wall which were built over 2,000 years ago just out of earth out of pounded earth yellow in colour and they've been wind

eroded wonderfully so that it's sort of scooped out and hollowed like the inside of a shell so it's very different east or west and what length are you talking about the total length now this is a wonderful question people say, I keep seeing the figure of 50,000 kilometres. People may disagree with that, but that's a kind of standard figure that is trotted out,

but I think nobody actually knows. 50,000 kilometres. Well, it's because you're talking about bits of wall here and bits of wall there. I'm sure that people will be able to be more precise later on. Fundamentally, you're travelling about sort of 6,000 miles, from 6,000 kilometres, sorry, from east to west. But you've got lots and lots of layer of wall, but I don't think anyone knows. Can you take us back sixth century lots of little walls, the warring states, building walls, earth walls often to keep the other warring states away from their particular warring state?

And then how did the idea of the thing, as it were, get going, the idea of a unifying wall? I don't know if there's ever been really a properly unifying wall, but the idea of a greater wall comes with the first emperor of China, Chincha Huang Di, who was a terrific builder. We're talking about date? 221 BC, he unites China. He conquers all, well, eventually gradually has conquered all the other warring states which had divided China

and each of which had little walls around them. Sorry to interrupt, but out of chin comes China, so from 221 we get the idea of China. We also, not just the name, but also the territory. Before that, China is just a series of little states. It's he who makes it a unified state from the Great Wall down to the south. And it was the first time in a dynamic way. Not only bringing the wall together, joining it up, which you'll tell us more than a second,

but also he regulated the coinage, weights and measures, he axel lengths of carts and extended the wheels, so they went along the roads, he centred the bureaucracy. He sort of made China 2,200 years ago. Absolutely. I don't think he's ever really given credit for that. I mean, in Chinese history, he's the biggest villain there ever was, and he's ferocious. Well, I think partly because a lot of his, particularly his building works,

he built the Great North Road right up towards Mongolia. He built, and he also, of course, joined up many of the little walls to make a greater wall. And all of this required labour. And the labour was Corvay labour. People laboured for the state on roads and walls as part of their tax obligation. And there are lots of stories, partly because the Great Wall is so free. far north, people going there and dying and their wives weeping, and it was regarded as being a sort of a very fierce and ferocious way of extorting tax.

But there was some splendour. He also had the buried army, didn't he? Yes, of course, a lot of corvay labourers would have had to work on that as well. Not as well. So he joined the wall up in the first sort of what we could begin to call the Great Wall of China. He joined up some of the walls and he created new walls and he made a much more systematic fortification, I think. Ron Amita, Francis has touched on who built it and who constructed it. Can you just tell us a bit more about that? Yes, I mean, we have this one figure, Chin Shih Huangdi, the first emperor of China, as he's known in retrospect,

who is regarded as this great unifying figure. And he's been controversial in Chinese history. I would actually add one thing to what Francis just said. There is one person in recent history who actually praised him as a great hero, and that was Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution, who regarded the ruthlessness with which the first emperor, had used his state powers to build walls and to unify the country as a very good thing, but you wouldn't necessarily want the endorsement of Mao as your primary endorsement.

And they're probably up among the ancestors discussing it all? Yes, they're probably up there exactly kind of looking down on their various achievements. But in terms of putting together this wall, one of the very important things that the First Emperor did was essentially to create a symbolism around it, because of course it's important to remember that while there were walls of a sort, made out of this type of tamped down earth and stones and any other materials that might have been available in the particular areas. There wasn't a perception until quite late in the day until this period of the First Emperor that this was a unifying wall. And also the meaning of the war was not simply a defensive one.

We come to tend to think of it as a barrier against what sometimes are called the barbarians from outside. But in fact, of course, the war can also be thought of as a way of declaring your power of expanding your territory. and walls can mark out the area that you want to control as well as the areas that you want to defend. And that's one of the things that the First Emperor was able to do in a much more integrated way than any of those smaller rulers of kingdoms who came before him.

So if you had to tell us, Rana, one reason why he wanted to join up these walls and make it into the beginnings of the First Great Wall, what would be the one reason? Was it, to clarify, was it a border, was it a defense, Was it a place from which you could project tax into different areas? I would say that over and above everything else,

it was the delineation of a unified state for the first time. To understand the importance of that, it might be worth just using a quick parallel from European history at a broadly similar period, which is ancient Greece, also a place that had lots of parallel city states existing together, and eventually that, of course, becomes unified under various later emperors. But if one thought that there had been some Greek ruler, perhaps, you know, Alexandra or someone,

who comes out and brings all these city states together to try and create a culturally unified state that's able to stand against the outside world. That will be the sort of motivation that was there. So this is really the idea of trying to create a unified people who exist under the control of one recognised ruler. And that's something that what we now know as China didn't have before that emperor. Isn't there a reasonable analogy with the Roman walls?

Yes, I mean, Rome obviously, as a major empire, used its walls both to defend itself, but also to show the barriers. I mean, Hadrian's wall is a good example of that there. In this particular case, though, there's also a desire on the part of the Chin Emperor to show a very unified culture. And one example of that that's perhaps different from the Roman case is in the case of language. I mean, one of the things that the Chin Emperor did as part of his state unification was to try and unify the famous Chinese characters, the way in which China actually writes its written language. And in some ways, with obviously adaptations, the form of written Chinese that comes from the days of the First Emperor up to the present day is essentially the same set of characters. I mean, the form of them and the shape of them change in various ways. But it was linguistically a way of doing the same sort of thing as the Wall did in terms of the territory.

Francis touched briskly on the number of people who built the thing hundreds of thousands of plot Can you just develop that a little, Rana? Yes, one of the other ways in which the First Emperor tried to create a unified state and also a sense of obligation between the people and the ruler was to get the ordinary people, the wider population, to owe a certain amount of labour to the state.

The term corvé is the one that Francis used, and that's the way in which it's usually known. Labor was tax? Essentially, labour is a form of tax. This is an era across the world, but certainly in China before we have cash payment for tax. There are also other ways, grain is another way in which tax was sometimes paid. But for most people, particularly those who are landless, it was a way of performing a sort of tax obligation. The other way to perhaps think of it as a kind of conscription service.

I mean, it wasn't necessarily soldiers who would do it, although, of course, over the course of the war later on, it would be part of the way in which soldiers would play out their military. obligations, but certainly in terms of a certain number of years and a certain amount of labour, which the state was entitled to take up. This was the formalisation of an obligation, which in some ways looks very similar to the modern nation state. It's a sort of an Egyptian scale of people being whipped into line to build these massive monuments. Can you just give us some idea? I haven't got anything specific enough yet. How many people went, how many died, what conditions? Just a bit of life. We are talking about hundreds. I'm just actually. Well, both of them come together.

One of the sources that we have for understanding the feelings, the emotions of people who took part in these Corvay battalions comes actually from the poetry of the time, which has come down to us. And there are poems that actually are laments essentially about people. You know, there's one very powerful one where essentially mothers are told not to have sons, because if they have sons, they'll be conscripted and they'll be sent off to work and possibly die in building the walls up in the far north. In terms of numbers, we're talking here, it seems likely, to be tens or even hundreds of thousands of people at any one time. We have to remember that, of course, China's population was much, much smaller than it is today. And, of course, the area that was controlled by what we now think of as people who are culturally Chinese was much smaller than in the current day. But we're still talking about a very large proportion of the population. And certainly this was something that became universal.

I mean, everyone, every family would have been touched by this experience because so many young men were needed to go and do the building. And not many came back? So it's difficult to know exactly. One of our best sources historically for understanding how the war was built was one of China's first great classic historians, man named Sima Tien. And he gives a very detailed description of the wall itself, the length, the height and so forth,

but doesn't tell us much about what we'd now call the social history of exactly how many people actually built it. So that's a bit of a mystery. Thank you very much. Julia Lovell, can you tell us about the myths that surrounded the project then in the past? Heron has referred to the poetry and something. Now, that's an excellent question. Although the wall, the chin wall that we've been talking about,

looked very, very different from the wall that millions of tourists think of as the great wall now, this sort of very, very impressive brick and stone construction that Francis described just north of Beijing. So the chin wall did look different. It tended to be, it sort of made a very pragmatic use of sort of materials available at the time. Sometimes it sort of joined up old existing walls, sort of mounded earth and brick and stone. So it was altogether sort of a less permanent, a less elaborate construction. At the same time, it still elicited amazement from its observers, from historians at the time.

I thought, you know, how could this thing be done? And even today we think, how could this thing have been built in a pre-mechanical? pre-industrial age. And so as a result, people often reached for sort of supernatural explanations for how this astonishing thing could have been created. And some of these explanations can't help but appeal, rather to me, who failed to get past TCC physics. So one explanation is that, for example, the first emperor he had a magic whip or a shovel

or a horse before which the wall just sort of sprang up. and any sort of strange sort of meandrings and twists and turns of the wall are explained by the fact that a sudden sandstorm blew up and the horse lost its way, that kind of thing. Was there more of that? That's great. Well, another explanation which also appeals to me is that they just happened to be a very, very large dragon flying over North China at the time.

It got awfully tired. It belly flopped to the ground and it turned into the great wall. And you sort of see the sort of the vestiges of this myth. in some of the old folk names of the Great Wall. Sometimes it's referred to as the Earth Dragon, which sort of both refers to the nature of materials used.

It was made up out of of Tamped Earth. But it also... Tamped, just... We've used that word several times. Can you just tell this as what you mean by Tamped? Yes. Effectively, wool builders would have sort of created a sort of hard exterior, sort of made up of wood or stone, if you like,

and then filled the interior of it, make it solid effectively, with sort of earth or sand or twigs, whatever really came to hand on the... What was lying around, what they could dig up beside them all, yeah. And then wall builders would sort of either with their feet or with sort of flattened implements, sort of

a sort of a sort of solid potato masher would sort of push down on the wall, sort of make it very, very solid and compressed. Just one final aspect of these legends, which I would like to point out, which picks up on Rana's very good point from before, and this is how negative and how critical many of

the sort of legend, sort of folk representations of the wall are. I think in the West, quite naturally, we tend to think of the Great Wall as sort of, well, great, basically, a sort of symbol of sort of China's self-confident sense of itself, sort of desire to differentiate itself from sort of the foreigners on its borders. But in fact, if you sort of look through Chinese history, sort of the long 2000 years in which walls were built across China's north, often wall building is sort of a last resort policy after other policies have been discarded and it's also associated with tyrants it's sort of associated with exploitation and bankruptcy

so sort of Rana's point and sort of Francis's point about sort of widows sobbing about their husbands being sort of work to death on the Great Wall this is something which is a very very important part of popular views of the war In 2007, the Chin Dynasty, the First Emperor, Powned by the First Emperor, overthrown by the Han, briskly, can you tell us what the hand did? The Han are very conscious of succeeding to the Chin. So when they come to power, they sort of very, sort of rather moralistically,

directly blame the fall of the chin on its sort of exploitative policies, of which wall building is sort of very much one of those. So they sort of blame that the chin, for having this sort of misapprehension about empire that sort of empires can be controlled through sort of walls of iron and armies and so on and so they very much sort of take the sort of Confucian moral upper ground I suppose over over the chin and sort of portray themselves as benevolent and so on

but the interesting thing is the thing about hand history which is roughly between 200 BC and 200 AD is that Han rulers often whenever they can and often when they can't they sort of go back to this strategy of wall building themselves to control, defend, but also sort of police in a sort of fairly imperialist sort of way, North China. And they're big, I suppose, the novelty of hand wall building is to really push wall building out to the West. And this has both a strategic rationale to divide the tribes to the West, but also an economic rationale to control the Silk Road.

Rana, this is a tricky one, but we've got to about 200, AD and I really want to get on to the Ming dynasty in 1368. Sorry about that, but could you just get us there as fast as you can? So we just need about a sort of a thousand, thousand years of history. Yeah, but normally much happens really, doesn't it? Well, no, lots of things happen, but in a funny way what happens during that period is a downgrading of the walls. Now, they're still there, all of these walls that have been built, this kind of tamped earth that Julian Francis have been talking about, and these things grass over, they moulder away a little bit. but their importance is more symbolic than defensive for most of that period.

The reason being that this is the time of a flourishing of China's engagement with the outside world. The absolute height of it actually picks up on what Julia was just saying at the end there and I think in our time has done previously, which is the Silk Road, which links China during the middle of that period to the Middle East India and beyond. At that point, the greatest perhaps of China's dynasties, the Tang, is looking outwards. This is a time when foreigners are not people to be defended against with the wall, rather to be brought in, you could almost say, I think, that it's a multicultural society. One of the trendiest things you can do in Tang Dynasty, China, is to marry a woman from

Central Asia or India and wear foreign-style costumes. So this is a period when the walls are not really there as a defence, but they continue to exist and have a slightly different symbolism, which is to do with the edge of the empire. Again, I keep coming back to the question of literature, but it's one of the best entry points we have to understanding the emotions of people across Chinese history. and there are great court poets of the Tang Dynasty and Beyond who talk about being sent to essentially bureaucratic positions right at the end of the wall, places like Jaiuguayan,

which is at the western end of China at this time. And they write these long sort of rather sad odes about how they've been exiled from the joys of the capital and the happy drinking parties and so forth because they're stuck out. And it's the equivalent of being made an ambassador in perhaps some rather obscure and dry and stony country in the back of beyond.

And all through this period, we have the rise and fall of empowers. We also have continuing threat of dynasties. We also have continuing threats mostly from the north non-ethnically Chinese people and I'd really rather use that term than barbarians, which we keep hearing over and ever again. Barbarians is a Western term and it's

a judgmental one which I think we need to get beyond. So there's always this threat from the north, it's Mongols, it's Juerchen, it's Torba, it's different ethnic peoples, all of whom come in contact with Chinese civilization and they interact with it, but they also

so sometimes attack it. And that brings us all the way up to the early modern period of the Ming Dynasty, 14th, 15th century when the wall becomes important again. Francis Wood, can you take us, enter the Ming dynasty, 1368? They decisively changed the wall, as I understand it, when this extraordinary man, Zhu Zhu Jiang, you can't pronounce it? Zhu Yuan Zhang. That's right, who was a destitute peasant who went to a monastery

because he'd nowhere to live and they couldn't even feed him, and somehow rather he led a rebellion and became the first great Ming emperor and attacked the wall. I mean, gave his attention to the wall. In fact, it was the third Ming emperor who really dealt with the wall. I mean, the founding of the Ming is quite extraordinary. It's a sort of Monty Python story of grinding poverty to emperor. But it was the third Ming emperor, the Jungler emperor,

who had been in thiefed in Beijing. That was his area, the north of China. and he moved the capital to the north and devoted himself to exterminating the Mongols as far as possible. And it's, although I think much building actually happens slightly later, but it's he who brings a new concentration to that wall, the whole wall area. So let's get up like a normal. What are they doing?

What are the Ming emperors doing to the wall that is important? They are reinforcing it. They are making it particularly in that area, just due north of Beijing and slightly to the western east and over to the coast. they are strengthening it as a defence against these northern peoples. There is defence for their capital? Yes. Capital City, their new capital city.

It's very important to move the capital city. The capital city was originally in Nanjing. They move it to the north. Because it was frightfully important. If you're using the wall as a sort of defensive structure, which it is in the Ming, you need to be close enough to make sure that it's well garrisoned, that you've got the best troops there

and that they are well fed and aren't going to kind of run away to the north. So you have the wall in the Ming, particularly acting more as a kind of military line of defence. I mean, isn't it in sense really a defence itself, although it is strengthened, covered in brick, and with all these little towers built so that the troops can live and keep out of the rain. But what it is is a way of keeping the troops supplied. They can move along it freely. They live in the watchtowers.

They can keep their food and their hay and their horses in the watchtowers. So it's really a sort of a line of support for the crack troops who are defending the nation. We've omitted trade so far in this discussion, Francis, but there were lots of places where traders could come through these special gates and passes and so on. Absolutely. I mean, the Ming regard the wall as a defensive structure, but throughout history it has been a very permeable wall. And as Rana and Julia have mentioned before,

I mean, it's not really a demarcation of, it's not a state boundary. It's a boundary between the Chinese area and the area beyond. The people beyond the wall bring things that the Chinese want like horses. The Chinese provide metal and all sorts of luxury goods to the people beyond the wall. So in terms of trade, it's extremely permeable. Julia Lovell, to what extent was the rebuilding of the wall about Ming symbolism, about imperial symbolism? I think that's an important part of it.

I think what we got to remember about the Ming is there are a dynasty, which in a way come to power with something, of a chip on their shoulder. What is overshadowing them is memory of the Mongol conquest, because the Ming dynasty follows the UN dynasty, which was the dynasty founded by the descendants of Genghis Khan. So this sort of memory of this sort of humiliation of China, having been completely conquered by these northern Mongol tribes, does hang over them. And in a way, it sort of generates this political and cultural conflict, which drives up this very, very permanent, elaborate, impressive form

of the Great Wall. And if you travel along the wall, in many respects, it does seem to be littered with this quite bombastic imperialist symbolism. Just to give you an idea of some of the names of the different passes over the walls, there are one tower in the northwest

is called the Tower for Suppressing the North. Other towers are called for suppressing the rebellious catives. There's another tower which is called the Tower for suppressing the goat-like foreigners. On the the western extreme of the wall, the gate to the facing out to the west is called the gate to glorious civilization, i enter China and you'll be entering the sort of wonderful

civilized area and so on and so forth. So there is this sort of very confident bombastic message being pronounced, but at the same time I suppose we probably shouldn't overestimate the completeness of the theory. You know, the theory was to create this cordon, I suppose, across North China. But in reality, this labour was often sort of quite sycophiles. in. You read in the accounts that bits of wall are being rebuilt and they're sort of falling down in other places and so on. The condition for the crews on the walls were truly terrible as far as the sources could make out. I read this terrible statistic that says that 80 to 90% of the border guards perished because food and clothing and weapons budgets were so low. And also,

I think one sort of one ironic fact is that in 1644 as Ming-Chalien, China is about to fall to a new tribal power, they are still building the wall. Rana, how does the wall reflect, or does it reflect a Chinese aesthetic in any way? Yes, one of the things that's very clear about the wall that emerges in the Ming Dynasty and which really, in a sense, is the form of the wall that we have today, is that it's an architectural achievement in the way that the earlier wars we've talked about from 2000 years ago really weren't. Those are really just sort of kind of banks of this sort of earth.

with some stone and some wood around them. These are actually very carefully worked out pieces of architectural achievement. And therefore what they do is to do a lot of the things that make them very distinctively Chinese. Everything from, for instance, I mean again to give specific examples, the use of dragon symbolism. This is something that has remained a cultural symbol of China over many, many thousands of years. We've heard the legend of how in one form, how the dragon itself formed the wall. And if you look in detail at some of the carvings at the various gates of. of the wall. You'll see that the dragon symbol is built in there. Also, the very traditional

sort of Chinese tiling and the use of the sort of the grey and white bricks and so forth, all of them symbols of a particular type of architectural ability and architectural power, as well as, of course, as well as, of course, an example of the advance of civilization in terms of the manufacture of bricks, for instance. I mean, this is a technologically more advanced wall than could have been created previously because of the advances in Chinese science and technology. Francis Wood, to stay with the bricks, some of them are signed. There are bricks which record the people who made them.

They have the names of each sort of army brigade and division. And these are important, I mean, symbolically, I mean the idea of participation and putting your name to the wall, which is a very sort of normal human thing. But also it tells us one thing, which is that also the type of labour has changed slightly, that this is a much more advanced system than the Corve labour system where you just drag anyone in in a sort of system of conscription.

Here you've got people making bricks specifically in the areas which they're repairing and these are army units who are doing it and they will be paid in money. So it's economically, it's a very different workforce. Can I come up to you briefly, Rana for one thing? In 1644, China was invaded from Manchuria

by the Manchur and they overthrew the Ming. And then it's the Ming's from 1368, 1640, then a Manchu from 1644 to 1912. These two great dynasties occupy an enormous amount of power and time in the Chinese story. Anyway, so the wall didn't stop the Manchu conquering them, did it? So it wasn't very effective in that sense. It wasn't effective in that sense. I mean, just to say Manchuria, this area is the northeast of China

beyond the kind of great war in the northern part. No, because the reason that the Ming dynasty eventually fell, and it was quite similar to the reason for the fall of previous dynasties, was essentially an inward collapse in which the economy was failing, essentially the Ming bureaucracy hadn't kept pace with the growth of society in various ways. And these were things that essentially made the country weak. I mean, again, we've heard from Francis and Julia, things like not supplying the soldiers on the Great Wall sufficiently,

if they weren't eating and they weren't being fed and watered, and the ability of the patrols to keep a watch out for what was happening in the north was being impaired, then the actual fact of the wall wasn't enough. There were gaps. Horsemen from the northeast, like the Manchus could simply ride round and find their way around. And of course they did, and what they found there was an enfeebled dynasty, which they were able to overthrow. But what they wanted to do once I'd overthrow in this infeble dynasty was swimming tight them.

Yes. Or take over to be assimilated. They were willing assimilitees. Yes. I mean, this is one of the interesting things about China's last dynasty, which, as you've mentioned, lasted for nearly 300 years to the early 20th century. Its ruling elite was not ethnically Chinese. They were actually this nomad horse riding people, the Manchus. But again, there's a bit of a sort of Greece-Rome situation here, even though the Romans conquered the Greeks, they respected their culture. And there's something similar going on here.

Once the Qing dynasty, as it was known, the Manchu dynasty had got itself settled in Beijing and was the accepted ruling class, the Ming was by then, completely finished, they made it very clear they wanted to share the cultural achievements and the cultural norms of the wider Chinese population and society, which meant, for instance, using the traditional civil service bureaucratic exams in the Chinese style. But what did they, what was their take on the wall? They regarded the wall as being, again, an important cultural symbol, and it was important for them for a significantly different reason from the Ming. Rather than actually being a way of keeping the invaders out, because of course they had been

the invaders, they continued for about 200 years to use it as a barrier against Chinese coming into their homeland up in the northeast in Manchuria. The reason being that even though they wanted to create a Chinese-style dynasty in the main part of China based at Beijing, they also want to preserve what they regarded as an ethnically more pure homeland, which was more nomadic, which was not prone to the kind of what they thought was the complacency of Chinese civilization up there in the northeast. So the great war in the northeast, so the great wall in the northeast, became a barrier against a sort of ethnic contamination. Junior level,

but did the Manchus keep it who switched their name to the Qing, got the name China on their side as it were as everything else, as well as the infrastructure? Did they look after the wall? There are stories about how the

wall did, as Rana said, it sort of retained its old purposes as a security barrier, but if you like the security concerns are directly reversed. So before the wall was to prevent northerners coming south during the Qing, it becomes a way of, as Rana says, keeping this ethnically pure homeland. But it is still sort of used as a sort of test of security, I suppose.

So you have stories about the Qing emperors going in disguise through the wall just to check that those who have been posted out to guard it will interrogate closely enough people who are trying to pass in and out of the wall. Could be quite dangerous, couldn't it really? A bit like Caligula coming back on that party. No mind, that's a different matter. Another, you could call it invasion by a stretch of the word,

but anyway, was the Europeans began to arrive there. First of all, the Jesuit in around about 1600. And one of the things that they wrote about and talked about and sent back to the homeland in Europe was Tales of the Wall. That's correct. And I think the European cult of the Great Wall, if you want to use that phrase, is one of these historical ironies of the 17th and 18th century. First of all, what are the Jesuits doing in China?

Obviously, they want to gain access to this sort of potentially sort of paradisical market of souls. In order to get their toehold in China, they have to make themselves useful to Qing emperors. So they build astronomical instruments, for example. They teach the emperor's physics and maths. Interestingly, they become arms manufacturers for the Qing. well. So they build cannon and other weapons. They also do maps and surveys of the empire. And presumably while making these surveys, they have an opportunity to look at the Ming border wall north of Beijing. They're very, very impressed by it. In their accounts, they describe it as a

prodigious uniform wall. They extrapolate that it is a uniform wall stretching across thousands of miles of North China, and they write it up in a very worshipful way. And these accounts, then reach Europe and are very influential to important things of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire. And they become a sort of symbol of China's own wisdom and sort of superiority to the West in the 18th century. And there was a Protestant and British twist on this when Lord McCartney at the end of the 18th century arrived. He'd been very successful with Cushing the Great in his trading mission, but wasn't so successful, very frustrated in that attempt in China, but in awe of the war, which he wrote about. Francis Francis Wood.

Yes, he describes it in incredible detail. I was just looking the other day. I mean, he counts the number of bricks and the number of rows of bricks. You've got 48 rows and added, and then if you add the 72, which are up there and so on. He travelled with his entourage. They were travelling out beyond the wall to Chengdeur to meet the Chenlong Emperor, and they stop at Gulbeko, at one of the main passes. And as good British sort of landscape explorers, they climb up and they examine the

all in great detail, leaving behind at the bottom there two mandarin, mandarins who are accompanying them, who are not in the least interested at all. It's very much like a sort of 20th century tour group, you know, climbing all over it and the guide sitting at the bottom saying we've been here 200 times before. But McCartney, he was terribly impressed by it. And also because he, like the Jesuits, I mean, the Jesuits were very keen on describing things to bring the information back to Europe. And McCartney is the kind of first Protestant to do so, I suppose. But he also had in his entourage, for example, he had a military draftsman, Lieutenant Parrish,

who did the most extraordinary drawings, I mean proper technical drawings of the wall, which are still in the British Library. So we get this amazingly detailed picture of the wall in terms of structure, height. I mean, McCartney notes that five horsemen could ride abreast and two carriages could pass side by side. I doubt that the Chinese would have used sort of western carriages,

but he described it at incredible detail. And that was influential back in Britain, wasn't it? I think one of the things that's terribly important about both the Jesuit accounts and McCartney's account is that China was absolutely the rage. People would buy any sort of books about China, which always would feature the Great Wall. I mean, from the McCartney Embassy, I think there were at least six books published. I mean, even McCartney's Valley wrote an account of China and the Wall. Good. Yeah, in some ways, his Romanisation was better than anybody else's, actually.

He obviously had a good ear. Rana, so we're talking about it now being almost. tourist attraction, but it did still have a defensive purpose in the 19th and 20th or an offensive purpose in the 19th and 20th century? Well, in a funny way, the 19th and 20th century show the limitations of the

war as a means of defence. And again, there is a parallel with something like the Maginot Line in France in the 20th century, a sort of defensive idea that's outlived its usefulness. Because of course, what comes along with the European presence, I mean we mentioned Lord McCartney, but of course, let's say half a century after that, we have the opium wars

which open up China forcibly because the British bring not just opium but of course gunboats and a much superior technological capacity for violence, you might say. And it turns out that Great Walls aren't really much use if you've got a boat coming into your harbour with massive great mortars which is about to shoot you down if you don't sign a treaty. So in that sense, the wall itself no longer retains strictly defensive purpose in terms of preventing horsemen. But it does help to create a defensive. idea in the Chinese mind.

By the late 19th and early 20th century, China's leaders feel themselves under siege, not just from the outside world, but also because of internal social collapse. And the wall becomes a sort of symbol of the borders of this country which people feel, despite everything happening, is still an important civilisation

that needs to defend itself. Can you take that on, Julia Lopal, about the idea of what it represented in China to the Western world? Let's just talk to the Western world in that general. It was an awesome fabrication artifact and a thing of beauty

which as Francis said if you included the wall in a book you read about China you'd tell pretty well but in China how is its meaning changing when the West was invading it? I think that it's as as as Francis

and Rana said that you sort of the interesting thing is that through the 19th century and early 20th century when waves of Western globe trotters are visiting the wall and sending back these very, very enthusiastic accounts. The one thing they don't seem to notice is that their enthusiasm is by no means matched by Chinese enthusiasm.

But probably about 90 years ago, the leading theorists of Chinese nationalism, I'm thinking particularly of a man called Sun Yat-Sen, who's seen as the father of the modern Chinese state and modern Chinese revolution. They sort of cast around looking for symbols effectively to boost China's national self-esteem through the very, very bad years of the 20th century, where China is not only suffering social, economic, political collapse, but is also sort of buffeted by these Western invasions,

Japanese invasion, of course, and the sense of humiliation that this generates. So you have the ironic situation, I suppose, of Chinese nationalist grabbing hold of a national symbol to prop up their own self-esteem that was originally identified by the same foreigners who are humiliating them. So it's a sort of, I suppose,

one of those ironies of nationalism, how symbols get detached from their actual, history to serve surprising purposes. And also the importance of those symbols can be reversed as well. I mean, just take one specific example for about 20 years ago in the run-up to, you know, the famous Tiananmen Square killings. A television program that was shown nationally across China to tens of millions of people, possibly even 100 million people, actually took up this idea, which Julia's mentioned,

of the idea that the Chinese had drawn their self-esteem from this great wall. And said that actually, this is entirely the wrong symbol. We need to be looking out towards the ocean and important. embracing the outside world and that China can't keep clinging to this old-fashioned symbol of the Great Wall. And this was seen as almost sacrilegious by many people attacking this wonderful symbol of Chinese nationalism. So it was a real kind of taboo-breaking thing to criticise the Great Wall on television. But it had ended into Western literature, or we can call it, it, it ended into world literature, hadn't it, Francis Wood. Certainly, I mean, not just travel literature either.

I mean, I think one of the nicest stories is Kafka's Great Wall, which was written in about 1917. and he interestingly he doesn't sort of see it as this great sort of single wall I mean he points out that there are holes in it he also points out that it's of no interest really whatsoever if we are from the south that it's very much a kind of northern construct so he uses it almost as a symbol of a failure of oppression and a failure of the kind of the great nation state

and then you have Borges who looks at it in the opposite direction I mean for Borges it is very much the symbol of vast imperial power and crushing and humiliating the Chinese people. So it's taken up as a symbol, certainly, in Western literature. Julia probably knows much more of Western literature that includes it. I wouldn't say that. But absolutely, I love Kafka's story. But also I think Kafka's story has residences, I think,

with the original historical experience of building the wall, this idea that this wall building exercises, it stretches endlessly out. And now as I understand it, Rana, it's a thing that the Chinese fast-growing middle classes have to go to. Yes, as China develops a kind of domestic consumer economy, which of course is one of the ways in which the Chinese are trying to get out of their current economic problems, one of the things that's being really pushed hard is essentially sort of internal domestic tourism.

And of course, a trip to Tiananmen Square and, you know, seeing the great sort of central governmental place of China, is then followed up by a bus trip out to the Great Wall. So it's absolutely part of that. This idea of the Great Wall is also reinforced in people's minds by other things such as the use of Great Wall as a brand name for Chinese goods. It's a very prestigious name. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Julia Lovell, Francis Wood and Ryan Amitter.

Next week we'll be talking about what the astronomers call, the cool universe, the matter between the stars which infrared telescopes are now making visible. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.