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The Great Wall of China
Two thousand years of frontier walls snaking across northern China
The Great Wall of China is less a single wall than an argument carried on in stone, brick and rammed earth for some two thousand years. Successive Chinese states built and rebuilt barriers across the north to guard farming lands against the horse-riding peoples of the steppe, and the version most visitors know, crenellated and climbing razorback ridges near Beijing, is largely the work of the Ming dynasty. A national survey completed in 2012 measured all the walls ever built at 21,196 kilometers. Despite a durable myth, it cannot be seen with the naked eye from the Moon. It remains the longest structure humans have built and an emblem China uses for itself.
The walls run from the Bohai Sea east of Beijing, where the Shanhai Pass meets the water, across mountains, loess plateaus and grasslands to the Jiayu Pass in the Gansu desert, with older earthen sections reaching farther west. Ming builders used fired brick and dressed stone, adding watchtowers, beacon towers that signaled with smoke and fire, and fortified passes. In the west, much of the wall is tamped earth worn by wind into low ridges. Near Beijing, Badaling is the most visited section, heavily restored and busy, while Mutianyu is greener and quieter. Unrestored stretches such as Jiankou, often called the wild wall, crumble along steep crests and draw hikers, though some are officially closed to climbing.
Walls began going up in the 7th century BCE among rival states, and after Qin Shi Huang unified China in 221 BCE he linked many of them. The Han dynasty extended them west along the Gansu corridor to protect Silk Road trade. The Ming, who had driven out the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty in 1368 and feared its return, rebuilt the wall on a grand scale, and most of its brick sections date from the 16th century. UNESCO inscribed the wall in 1987, and the 2007 public vote named it one of the New7Wonders. Badaling alone drew nearly 10 million visitors in 2018 and caps entry at 65,000 a day. Erosion, farming and vandalism threaten unprotected sections, and Chinese surveys have estimated that about 30 percent of the Ming wall has disappeared.