How much do you know about the Great Wall of China? Why was it built, are there bodies buried in it, and can you really see the Wall from outer space? John Man, author of The Great Wall of China (2008), separates facts from fiction.
It cannot be seen from the Moon
It was Robert Ripley, the American illustrator who made a fortune with his cartoon feature Believe It Or Not!, who called the Great Wall "The mightiest work of man - the only one that would be visible to the human eye from the Moon":. This statement was, of course, founded on no evidence at all, since it was made 30 years before anyone had been in space. Yet it became sanctioned by use. Even the eminent Sinologist Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilisation in China, stated that "the Wall has been considered the only work of man which could be picked out by Martian astronomers":. Though discredited by astronauts, the Moon version is still widely quoted as a "fact":. The truth was established once and for all during the first Chinese space flight in 2003, when astronaut Yang Liwei said he couldn't see anything of it from orbit.
The Chinese don't call the Wall 'the Great Wall'
The Chinese term for the Wall emerges from a distant past - long before "the Great Wall": was used - when every city had its own wall. So fundamental was the connection between walls and cities that the Chinese used one word to cover them both, and they still do. There it is, in the Oxford Union Press's standard concise dictionary: Cheng: "1. city; 2. city wall":. The Wall, of course, is rather more than a city wall, so Chinese adds an adjective, not "great": but "long":. So the Chinese for "the Great Wall":, cheng cheng, means Long City. And Long Wall. And Long Cities, or Long Walls, plural. There is a way to resolve the contradiction: peel back a city wall in your mind, stretch it out, put farms and garrisons along it, and there you have it - Great Wall(s) equals Long City/ies.
The Wall you know and love is not as old as you think
The Wall is widely thought to date back 2,000 years to just after 221 BC, when China was first unified. In fact, almost everything which is that old is no more than a mound of earth. The popular idea of the Wall derives from the stone, battlemented structure built by the Ming (1358-1644). Its maximum age is about 500 years.
It was not built to repel Mongols
The Wall was commissioned by the First Emperor who died in 210 BC, long before the emergence of the Mongols around AD 800. The threat then was from the Xiongnu, who possibly became the ancestors of the Huns. The classic confrontation with the Mongols occurred only from the late 14th century, when the Mongols were chased out of China by the Ming.
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