Great Wall in 50 Objects Read online

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Maps: Origin of Objects

  Part One – Survey: Eight Keys

  Objects from various dates

  1. On Reaching Europe

  Abraham Ortelius’ Theatre of the World atlas

  2. A Place of No Return

  Meng Jiangnü’s Endless Search for her Husband woodblock print

  3. The Enemy at First Sight

  Bronze face of a Xiongnu warrior

  4. Observing a Ceasefire

  Painting of a Mongol archer

  5. Just Add Water

  Pottery sherds from the desert floor

  6. Prefabrication

  An inscribed brick from the Ming Wall

  7. Accelerated Warfare

  Bronze mirror showing cavalry

  8. Decisive Advantage

  A nomadic composite bow

  Part Two – Foundations

  Objects from the third century BC to AD 221

  9. The Iron Age Factor

  Mould for casting iron chisels

  10. Sure Footing

  A bronze stirrup

  11. An Eyewitness Report

  Sima Qian’s ‘Records of the Grand Historian’

  12. Writers and Fighters

  Polyhedral wooden record

  13. Past Glories

  ‘Map of China and the Barbarian Lands’ stele rubbing

  14. Charting Archaeology

  Stein’s sketch map of the Han Wall

  15. Alarms from the North

  Wooden records bearing signalling instructions

  16. A Han-Hun Wedding

  17. Mechanical Advantage

  Trigger mechanism of a crossbow

  Part Three – Intrusions

  Objects from AD 221 to 1368

  18. Becoming Chinese

  Figurine of an armoured horse and rider

  19. The Gap Years

  Tri-coloured glaze figurine of a camel

  20. Millennium Man

  Silver funerary mask of a Qidan nobleman

  21. The 75, 15, 10 Formula

  A pottery hand grenade

  22. Mapping History

  ‘Handy Maps of the Past Dynasties, Chronologically Organised’

  23. Harnessing Sun and Wind

  Gold-tipped trident of a spirit banner

  24. Sharpshooters

  Mongol arrowheads

  25. Cavalry Wear

  Mongol armour

  26. Horsepower

  The Mongolian horse

  Part Four – Core

  Objects from 1368 to 1644

  27. Frontier Palace

  Silk painting of the Imperial City

  28. Into Thin Air

  The wolf smoke alarm signal

  29. A Calamitous Sortie

  Iron gate lock

  30. Point and Shoot

  A blunderbuss

  31. The Gift of Horses

  ‘Presenting Horses’ scroll painting on silk

  32. Sixteenth Century Typos

  Bluestone stele bearing construction records

  33. Stone Age Weapons

  Gunpowder rock bombs

  34. A Bird’s Eye View

  Fired-clay roof guardian

  35. History In Situ

  Ink rubbing of a stele

  36. Relic of a Grand Commander

  Qi Jiguang’s steel sabre

  37. View from the High Command

  ‘Map of the Nine Border Regions’

  38. A Long Strip of Wall

  ‘Plans of the Jizhen Commandery’

  39. Globalisation

  Cornelis de Jode’s ‘new’ world map

  40. Moving Targets

  Foreign-style ‘Border Pacification Cannon’

  41. The Last Emperor

  Admonition decree from the Board of War

  Part Five – Ruins

  Objects from 1644 to 1987

  42. Science Convert

  ‘The Jesuit Atlas of Kangxi’s Realm’

  43. In Great Detail

  Captain Parish’s technical drawings

  44. New Convoys

  Photo of the Beijing to Paris inaugural car rally

  45. A Milestone Journey

  The Great Wall of China by William Edgar Geil

  46. Building Fiction

  Kafka’s Great Wall short story

  47. Back to the Wall

  Press photo from the Sino-Japanese War

  48. Prop Art

  1960s poster of peace and friendship

  49. ‘Love our China, rebuild our Great Wall’

  Painting depicting Deng Xiaoping at the Great Wall

  50. A Gift to China

  Pair of photos of Luowenyu, 80 years apart

  Epilogue

  51. Italian Journey

  The Borgia Great Wall scroll

  PHOTOS

  Chronology of Dynasties

  Bibliography

  Photo Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Also by William Lindesay

  The Great Wall Explained

  The Great Wall Revisited:

  From the Jade Gate to Old Dragon’s Head

  Images of Asia: The Great Wall

  Alone on the Great Wall

  To Qi

  Foreword

  Franz Kafka once wrote about the Great Wall of China, upon which he had never set foot: construction of the reportedly 5000-kilometre wall is carried out in one-kilometre sections by small groups of workers, leaving thousands of gaps along the line, in the hope they will be filled in slowly and gradually. But no one knows when, if ever, the gaps will be filled in. In fact, no one knows what the complete Great Wall is like. The workers certainly don’t, nor does the ‘authority’, or the nomads.

  This great myth of the Wall, fabricated and ruminated by Kafka, sounds oddly true today. Every year more than 20 million visitors go to see the unprecedented man-made construction, yet so little is known about it. How was the Wall built, anyway? (That was Kafka’s question.) How did it work as a defence system? What has happened to it during the past 2000 years? Ancient Chinese historians have a reputation for meticulously recording almost everything, but not in the case of the Wall – perhaps due to the imperial scholars’ avoidance of rough work on the wild frontiers, or simply because the Wall’s vastness in space and time went way beyond their grasp. Possibly for very similar reasons, modern accounts of the Great Wall are equally scarce, if not more so.

  In modern times, the unknown becomes scarcer every day. Unknowns attract curious people, but it takes someone seriously curious to grapple with such an unknown as the Wall. Fortunately for William Lindesay – and the rest of us – he meets the requirements. As a geographer, he is curious enough to have spent the best part of his adult life trying to know the Wall (twenty-eight years so far). Better still, as an endurance athlete whose marathon personal best is two hours and thirty-nine minutes (he says he should have done better), he was sturdy enough to have covered the length of the Wall on foot. In my opinion, he is the right man to talk to if you want to know anything about the Wall.

  William is no stranger to Chinese outdoor enthusiasts and Great Wall aficionados. Everyone is familiar with the signposts he set up on trails leading up to the Great Wall: ‘Take Nothing but Photographs, Leave Nothing but Footprints.’ Many joined William in picking up litter on the Wall, and he’s been arranging such activities since 1998. His knowledge of the Wall and his passion for it make him many people’s hero. Mine too.

  I met William in person in the summer of 2011 when he proposed a story for the Chinese edition of National Geographic magazine, where I was editor. He was planning an expedition in Mongolia to
search for a ‘missing’ section of the Wall, and the magazine eventually published an exclusive account of his exciting discoveries. The next year, Nat Geo in Beijing helped fund his second expedition in Mongolia, looking for other little known Great Wall segments. This was serious fieldwork, among the first that had been done on that part of the Wall.

  The theme of this book originated in an idea William had during his Mongolian expeditions: a new story of the Great Wall, put together using objects he had seen, collected or studied over the years – a story told through Wall-related artefacts. I liked the idea immediately, and in time the magazine rolled it out as a ‘virtual exhibition on paper’.

  William’s new approach to the Wall somehow reminds me of Kafka’s story: a colossal construction made up of small segments, a Wall that one could not know as a whole but only as discrete parts. And I see William’s effort as a response to the Kafka myth. Every story tells you something about the Wall, and what matters is not its total but how the parts look when you put them together.

  Ye Nan

  Editor, National Geographic

  (Chinese-language edition), 2009–2013

  Beijing, Summer 2014

  Introduction

  One rarely finds a perfect story of the distant past, complete and in one place, and certainly not for such a complex series of landmarking structures known simply as the Great Wall of China. Rather, one must embark on a journey, gather the parts of the story and slowly piece them together.

  My quest for the ‘Wall’ – which is actually a discontinuous series of fortifications surviving from numerous dynastic ages, in diverse shapes, forms and conditions – has led me since 1986 to trace their remains across deserts, steppeland and mountains. The walls themselves were always my main pathways, direct routes – until now.

  In 2012, I decided to come down from the Wall, so to speak, to investigate stories that were in the periphery – running beneath, beside, inside and out – and, sometimes, took place very far away from the Wall itself. This foraging took me into farmyards, museums, libraries, galleries, universities, workshops and collectors’ homes. I was looking for things which, one way or another, were inextricably linked to the story of the Wall, yet physically were no longer part of it, or perhaps had never been.

  This book chronicles my efforts in following leads, hunting objects down, gathering them up, piecing them together and making connections between them – all in order to elucidate unknown, overlooked or misunderstood episodes of the Great Wall story. Though a scattered and disparate lot, the items investigated shared a common quality: all were storytelling objects. I became increasingly attracted to them, these solid sources, confident they’d help me further penetrate the Wall’s mysteries, and discover more of its elusive personality.

  Through these objects, I wanted to tell a comprehensive Wall story, from its reasons to its ruins. For a year or two, I realised, I would have to curtail my time at the Wall itself and travel more widely – I would need to go to places where there might be just a single object to see, one person to meet, a sole point to learn.

  I began to draft a list of those historical figures I wanted to visit. Builders who had recorded their construction productivity on stone tablets. Weapons masters who had buried landmines. Bowyers who had made composite bows by laminating together ibex horn, birch wood and deer sinew. A cartographer who had arranged the Wall’s global debut by including it on his map of the world. An author whose work takes us to the Wall’s farthest reaches.

  From initiation to completion, this work was carried out over twenty-five months – for good reason, as will be explained below. A process with a production time averaging two weeks per object soon established itself. Selecting objects and contacting curators or owners came first. Next came my visit, or revisit, to meet, view, handle and photograph the object. On returning home, there was discussion, research, writing, rewriting and translating to be done.

  Completing a factual book in two years may seem fast, but the idea behind it had a much longer gestation. I had been tilted towards this imaginative approach by four distinct realisations, which occurred at different times and places during my Wall researches.

  The first came in the form of questions that arose during my solo traverse of the Ming Great Wall on foot in 1987. I felt the structure’s majesty, but its remoteness and eerie silence made me wonder about various ‘hows’. How long did it take to complete certain sections? How were rocks cut? How could enough wolf dung be collected to be placed at the ready to make the so-called ‘wolf smoke’ that warned of an enemy’s approach? What weapons did defenders use? How about the attackers? What bits of the Wall had been chipped off or picked up? What chunks had been gouged out? As my field knowledge grew, I saw more clearly what had gone missing, and where I might find the answers to my questions.

  Some were, as expected, in Wall-side museums, and it was in these that I experienced a second realisation. The placement of an artefact behind glass deprived it of personality. Most objects were gagged, displayed and labelled with a name, a date and a brief matter-of-fact description, and were unable to divulge their stories. Some were even kept in storerooms, away from the public. They needed interviewing and representing. I felt impelled to give these relics from the past the ability to speak to the people of the present, and vice versa: people have the right to see for themselves, or digitally access, things from the past.

  My third eye-opening moment: it was in Mongolia that I realised the importance of studying the Great Wall from two sides, rather than just one. Landscapes of desert and steppe, climatic events of drought and tzud winters, hunters and the hunted, horses and riders, bows and stirrups – all were startling, less well-known parts of the Great Wall story. Objects from these cultures, needed to be given a voice.

  My fourth realisation occurred randomly, in diverse places and at different times. In a gallery in London’s West End, where I laid hands on the world’s first internationally published atlas which contained a map of China. In the British Library, where I thumbed through files recording Aurel Stein’s 1907 investigations of the Han Dynasty Wall, built 2100 years ago. In leafy, well-to-do Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I walked up the driveway of a mansion, home of the writer of the first book published on the Great Wall. I understood that the Wall now exists beyond China and Mongolia.

  I had four groups of possible objects: items that were missing, artefacts that needed jailbreaking, things from the ‘other’ side, and aspects that had become international. They were like four threads, I realised, whose full beauty could only be seen once they were woven together. Collating them – effectively curating an exhibition – would have been the traditional way of doing this, but herding cats came to mind. I knew that the chances of such an exhibition happening were slim, but I treasured it as a worthwhile study, a journey that I should make when an opportunity materialised. That came earlier than expected, in the summer of 2012, when I was invited to create what became known as a ‘virtual exhibition’.

  The previous year I had organised my first expedition in Mongolia, focusing on a new area of Great Wall exploration and research. I was looking at long sections of walls there, labelled on the country’s own maps as ‘The Wall of Genghis Khan’. My findings were published in the Chinese-language edition of National Geographic. In China there was great interest in my conclusion that these structures were what I termed ‘The Great Wall Outside China’. On the back of several successful print features, and an online report which became the most popular on the magazine’s English-language website, Ye Nan asked me for further Great Wall story ideas.

  This was my opportunity to entwine my four threads as a serialised ‘Virtual Exhibition of the Great Wall’, which would run as monthly features. It was both a stimulating and intimidating challenge to regularly deliver so many Great Wall stories for readers of the magazine in China. I needed to decide how many objects to include, and how we would roll the stories out each month.

  How many objects? Surely a
structure as long as the Great Wall merited a telling with a good number. The construction history of the Great Wall, actually a series of border-defence systems, spans approximately 2000 years from around the third century BC to the mid-seventeenth century, during which time umpteen different great walls – perhaps sixteen – built by different dynasties appeared in the northern territories of their domains. Of these, it is the Ming Dynasty Great Wall which is the face of the great walls as the world knows it today. As it’s ‘only’ 500 years old on average, and therefore the best preserved of all the great walls, there is a plethora of antiquities that show and tell its history. That dynastic period alone could generate fifty objects worthy of study. But the Great Wall’s story goes well beyond the Ming Wall’s story; at least equal coverage of the pre-Ming era seemed reasonable.

  Was there any need to choose a round number, other than for neatness’ sake? One hundred objects, I decided, would be too many for the magazine to commit to, and for readers to absorb. I’d conceived my project, after all, as an exhibition which would showcase only the most enlightening, significant stories. This was not an academic project, a storage room; I wanted the exhibition to be succinct, accessible and personal.

  The first major international exhibition I ever saw was back in 1972, when the British Museum marked the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter; it had displayed just fifty antiquities from the treasure-crammed tomb. That had been enough to ignite my interest in Egypt, and ancient history, forever. Thus, I decided on fifty.

  That worked out at one object every forty-five years or so throughout the 2300-year lifetime of the Great Wall. While setting them in context and highlighting each epoch’s major political movements and cultural currents, I would choose the bulk of my objects to stand at every twist and turn of the Great Wall’s story, and a few to explain some absences and to account for the major nomadic intrusions. This was the broader Great Wall story, played out between the north and south across a wide frontier that may be described as the Great Wall theatre of war.

  My initial draft list, the editor remarked concernedly, was composed of only thirty-five objects. I was not perturbed by the shortfall; it was by design. As with all journeys, I expected to meet various strangers along the way, so I earmarked some space to accommodate them.