Great Wall in 50 Objects Read online

  Roof guardians (jishou) in procession are often, but not always, sandwiched between human figures riding a phoenix (dunshou) and a dragon (chuishou) and may be three, five, seven or nine in number. There’s only one absolute national exception to this rule: on the roof of Taihedian (‘Hall of Supreme Harmony’), which has nine plus one, the extra figure being an immortal man. Other buildings of premier imperial rank (with nine roof guardians) dominate the palace’s central axis, such as Qianqinggong, the Emperor’s evening palace. Separate ‘palaces’ of the Emperor’s principal wife and sons (the princes) were accorded seven roof guardians. Five sit atop buildings occupied by the concubines. Old photographs reveal five guardians on the gates of Beijing’s city wall, and three on the city’s pailou gateways and libraries.

  No perfectly preserved sentry-post structure on the Ming Wall has survived to indicate directly how many stars were accorded to the Emperor’s border defences. However, because the procession of guardians had a set pecking order, from one to nine, based on circumstantial evidence researchers have been able to deduce that the Ming Wall’s sentry posts (pufang) or its observation posts (wangting) had groupings of three roof guardians. Number four, the tian ma or ‘sky horse’, or five, the hai ma, or sea horse, have never been found in any sentry post’s rubble.

  According to Wu Menglin, the historian who oversaw the reconstruction of the Mutianyu Great Wall in the mid-1980s, the incorporation of roof guardian trios on Sanzuolou when it was reconstructed was based on this evidence. The first is the dragon (the Emperor and his imperial authority), the second is the phoenix (auspicious), and the third is the lion (bold and powerful, brave and fierce). Despite their good intentions, they are all a pretty crude and ugly lot, so I was fortunate to have found the most attractive of the trio, the phoenix.

  So, if some of the Wall’s component buildings had three guardians, what does that say about the defence’s overall ranking? To see the number of guardians as equating solely to the importance of the building is perhaps overly naive. What were the criteria for assessing ‘importance’? Were palaces for concubines really considered more important than border defences? My thoughts are that the ranking reflects not what is important, but who is important – or, more precisely, who is closest to the Emperor. He comes first, followed by his wife and sons, followed by his concubines, ministers and scholars, then by the masses living within the city wall, and then by the guards on the gates. Far away, over the northern skyline, come the soldiers on the Wall.

  Yet surely no one worked harder in His Majesty’s service than the labourers and the military families who built and manned his border defences. The laying of roof tiles and their ornamentation would therefore have been carried out with relief and ceremony.

  Having seen rural farmhouse roofs being built and repaired in North China (my own farmhouse in a Wall-side village was one), I can imagine the scene. The apex roof framework, consisting of a main central beam and a purlin on each side, gave support to forty or fifty rafters. The space between was filled with a lattice of long, thin branches. Next, on the exterior, came a thick layer of sticky mud. On top of this, slightly overlapping tiles were laid, with the lowest ones bearing special decorative tile ends, typically featuring a monster effigy; these protected the gable rafters from rainwater.

  Eight groups of the triads and perhaps a few spares made the journey up the mountain. A builder unpacked them, scaled a short ladder and, with dryish mud, stuck the roof-guardian tiles into position, paying attention to the pecking order. The process was repeated at the three other corners. Two rows looked towards the outside from opposite ends of the building, and two rows looked inwards.

  If you looked for sentry posts now on the Ming Wall in the mountains, at least on the Wild Wall, you would have to walk a long, long way. A few fine examples can be found in Funing County, Hebei Province, but the vast majority of these lookouts, crow’s nest buildings, lie in ruins. They were vitally important places, where guards were expected to remain alert, especially during the night, when the doors and window shutters down below would be closed, at least in winter.

  As sentry posts were the highest parts of any tower, which themselves were often built on peaks along the Wall’s line, they were in very dangerous locations when nature unleashed its wrath. Certainly they would have been exposed to gale-force winds the year round, but the probability of lightning strikes during summer thunderstorms was more alarming still. Given the frequency with which tourists have been struck dead by lightning whilst on the Wall in recent decades, it’s obvious that sentries would have been greatly endangered. It wasn’t only their altitude and exposure above almost everything else nearby, but also their widespread use of metal, in the form of swords, armour and helmets. All they could do was pray that the roof guardians did what they were supposed to do. Today, on the renovated Wall at Jinshanling, for example, science and superstition work in parallel, with roof guardians sitting beside copper lightning rods.

  It’s likely that the Black Dragon Phoenix fell from the roof during a thunderstorm at some time post-1644, when the Wall was abandoned. And because I found it myself, I can tender an archaeological brief. Its two pieces lay semi-buried amidst general brick and tile rubble, scantily overgrown with thin vegetation, on the top storey of a tower. Access to the upper floor was via a wide but high opening in the ceiling; it was extremely difficult to climb up, and even more difficult to come down.

  This object was quite a find. I should say that I’ve never taken tools to excavate at the Wall; I’ve just kept my eyes peeled for anything that could tell me the Wall’s story. Fortunately for me, it lay there, waiting. I picked it up, pieced it together and brought it home – perhaps saving it from captivity behind a glass case in a museum. I believe my decision to take it was justified. The Black Dragon Phoenix has a fascinating story to tell us – the story of its rise and fall, and of its place in the history of the Wall.

  35.

  History in Situ

  Ink rubbing of a stele

  Although it was only ‘made’ in 2002, I fear that this ink rubbing is on the verge of becoming an antiquity itself. It faithfully reproduces the contents of an inscribed tablet on the Wall, which is endangered. I first saw it in 1996, and each time I return I fear it will be gone, like other tablets before it.

  The stone belongs to a genre of antiquities that any archaeologist or historian will tell you is the most revealing and hoped-for discovery they could wish for: an inscription in situ. That means it directly communicates information about an event: who did what, and when. By such objects, people from the past literally communicate with us. And for the residents of a village in the mountains north of Beijing, it’s even more than that: it’s a family message, with ancestors from twenty-five generations back telling their descendants what they did.

  When it was carved, in 1578, such stone records were quite common. Typically, they were placed within a battlement at the end of a season to mark the completion of a length of the fortification. When this rubbing was produced, in 2002, the number of such stones remaining in situ had become much, traditional and revered method of obtaining exact copies of stelae (see Object 13).

  Involving the simplest of materials – paper, a water-glue solution, a brush, hand thumper and ink – the craft is as sustainable as any process can be. This rubbing, which took Mr Hou Ronggui about two hours to complete, including drying times between multiple coats of ink, is not immediately stunning. It’s light-black overall, and any inscribed writing or design has stayed white. But look at its decorative edge, explore its cracks and blemishes, and read its characters. Both nature and man have shaped this rock, with weathering, masonry and writing. Even before we decipher its message, we can see how it represents a powerful link between the past and the present.

  In the autumn of the seventh year of the reign of Emperor Wanli, two sections of the border defence wall, 69 zhang in combined length, were constructed.

  One section, which snakes westward from Wong’
eryu Gully to Duantouya (‘Lose One’s Head Cliff ’), is 53 zhang long. The other starts at the Duantouya Cliff, extends westward and ends at the Right Army Barracks at Liangzhu. It is 16 zhang long.

  The following persons were put in charge of the project by Imperial Envoy Guan Xia:

  He Tianjue, commander of the Baoding Military Command and chief of staff of the Zhongshun Army Brigade;

  Li Xueshi, a staff member of the Imperial Army Headquarters and formally a staff member of the Shaanxi Provincial Military Command;

  Zhao Jiusi, a staff member of the Imperial Council of Supervision and formally a lieutenant at the Military Recruitment Office; and

  Wan Guo, representative of the Changzhen Government Office and formally a staff member of the Military Recruitment Office.

  The following military officials oversaw the work on the spot:

  Captain Wang Shizhong, also a civil official, in charge of 1000 households

  Lieutenant Yang Zhou, also a civil official, in charge of 100 households

  The following were project managers:

  Li Shangzhi, Dong Guangxian and Zhang Xun, who are all military officers with the rank of battalion commander.

  The tablet was erected on the most auspicious day of December, in the seventh year of the reign of Wanli Emperor.

  The ancient zhang unit converts to 3.3 metres, so this inscription records the building of 227 metres of Wall, beginning at the start of autumn and finishing by winter – a period of approximately eighty days. The latter part of the text tells us who really did the work: Captain Wang and Lieutenant Yang, who were jointly in command of 1100 military families, which may have provided around 4000 workers.

  After completing their task, they held a celebration, and on that auspicious winter day the stone, already inscribed, was set in its place. Of course, it wasn’t the 4000 who were named but the officials who bore responsibility for the quality of the work; this is one of the fundamental reasons for the making of such records.

  To appreciate how this stone survived four long centuries in situ, we need to go for a walk along the Wall in search of others. We are at a section of the premier Great Wall in the Beijing region, in Huairou District. We walk one of the district’s sixty-one kilometres of remaining Wall, through six or seven watchtowers, but we don’t see a single inscribed tablet. The majority were placed within the fortification, the most favoured position being in a frame-like arrangement of bricks on the inside face of an exterior battlement – so we just need to look for those frames. We discover that not only have the tablets gone, but the removal operations proved to be very messy, and frames were even gouged away to get at them. At other locations, entire battlements were wrecked to loosen them.

  The reason so few tablets were preserved in situ was their accessible position. They were purposely set in convenient locations so that people could read them. Dimensionally, they were slightly smaller than a broadsheet newspaper, and weighed between twenty and forty kilograms. Easy to reach and not too heavy, they’ve presented themselves as easy pickings. Qi Jiguang called the purpose-made openings in the battlement for releasing rock bombs shi lei kong (see Object 33). I refer to the places where tablets used to be as shi bei kong, or ‘tablet gaps’.

  Clearly, those tablets still in place at the Wall are endangered. That’s what makes our rubbing increasingly precious – it’s a copy of a rare in situ tablet, which only remains because it was placed in a very atypical position, on the outside face of the Wall’s containing face (where nobody could read it), and five metres above the ground (where it was difficult to reach). To access it, read it, rub it or remove it, you’d either have to rappel two metres down from the battlement, or climb a ladder five metres up from the ground.

  I was thrilled back in 1996 when I first spotted the tablet by chance. In 2002 I led Hou Ronggui there, a master rubber of tablets from Beijing’s Temple of Confucius, to produce a rubbing for me. We borrowed a ladder from farmers in the nearest village, a kilometre away. Our project was so successful that Mr Hou and I returned to the same village in 2010 to repeat the process for a TV documentary that I was presenting for the National Geographic Channel. The farmers in the village were adamant that the tablet had since been stolen; thankfully, they were wrong. But there’s no smoke without fire, and it was apparent that the brick frame around the tablet had indeed been further gouged in an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge it. In this knowledge, the tablet takes on enhanced importance because of its endangered status.

  DESCRIPTION: Ink rubbing on paper of an inscribed stone tablet; sixty-eight by forty-four centimetres, dated 1578 and extant in the stonework of the Ming Great Wall, Huairou District, Beijing

  SIGNIFICANCE: Records the names, ranks and productivity of men building a 227-metre section of the ramparts

  ORIGIN: Rubbing made September 2002

  LOCATION: Author’s collection, Beijing

  From studies of the contents and positions of the relatively small number of tablets that have been preserved in museums or can still be found in situ, they fall into five main groups. They are tower tablets, above doorways, which showed a number – in other words, the tower’s ‘address’; inspection tablets, which commemorated the visits of high-ranking military officials checking up on the fortifications and those garrisoning it; boundary tablets, recording the military division involved in the building; tablets containing poems written by visiting military officials; and, most interestingly, tablets detailing the construction work, as ours does. Had we walked along our one-kilometre section in the early 1640s, we’d have seen examples of all the above tablet types.

  What’s gone missing is the real-time story of the Wall – its construction, its organisation (numbering of towers), the names of the army divisions involved, and its top brass visitors. This information was written on the spot, then and there, slab by slab, season by season, tower by tower, stage by stage, as building proceeded and was concluded, as operations progressed and as the Board of War sent its inspectors out from the capital. We’re now left with what amounts to a book without most of its pages.

  Based on the existence of tablet gaps on our one-kilometre section of Wild Wall in Huairou, it’s estimated that there were originally (before the Wall’s abandonment) approximately eighteen inscribed stones along its length, positioned at various places. That equates to 180 tablets every ten kilometres, or 1800 over 100 kilometres.

  Given that the Ming Great Wall survey organised by the State Administration for Cultural Heritage found there to have originally been 388 kilometres of fortifications built within today’s Beijing municipality, then we might have expected to see an astonishing 7000 inscribed slabs of various shapes, sizes, styles and purposes back in the 1640s – which illustrates the scale of what we have lost. Etched upon these tablets was the Great Wall’s life story, its autobiography, written by the men who built, operated and inspected it.

  Optimists estimate that around 100 tablets may still remain with the Beijing region, but I’d put the number at half of that. That’s one from every seventy. Their survival depends on two criteria: weight and location. As we have seen, inaccessible tablets are relatively safe; large and heavy stones, too, have proved just too difficult to remove.

  As for those carted off, I’ve seen them in the bushes below ramparts, used as doorsteps to farmhouses, under water butts, as stones for rubbing the washing upon, at the bottom of wells, in pigsty walls, and in some Great Wall museums. But the balance sheet does not add up. Conclusion: the whereabouts of many are still unknown, and their contents remain unanalysed. The pages of this ransacked book lie torn and scattered over villages and valleys below the Wall.

  Unlike the biblioclasm of Qin Shihuang back in 213 BC, which involved great fires as records on wood were burned, the destruction of the Ming Great Wall’s life story was neither sudden nor politically orchestrated. Rather, a slow, sustained scavenging has befallen the ramparts since their abandonment in 1644. It continues to this day, targeting the last remaining
tablets. Since my last visit to the site of our tablet, in November 2010, photographs by other researchers suggest that further efforts to gouge it out have been made.

  As of 2013, the tablet had remained there for 425 years, surviving earthquakes, floods, war and revolution. It seems inevitable that the epitaph to this tablet’s longer-than-usual life story may soon be written, for surely not even its height will protect it for ever. And it’s highly likely, and ironic, that the culprits, or at least collaborators, will be local, will be namesakes of those etched on the tablet – Wang, Li, Yang, Zhang and Zhao – but whose own ideas of ancestor worship falls short of preserving their extraordinary achievements.

  36.

  Relic of a Grand Commander

  Qi Jiguang’s steel sabre

  The Wall’s story is a war story, and in discovering it we have encountered weapons of increasing complexity and ferocity. Each of the five weapons we’ve met brought either a marginal or a major advantage to its user. The overall trend is one of resourcefulness, and of progress: the lamination of the bow, the mechanics of the crossbow’s trigger mechanism, the blast of gunpowder, the control of cast guns, the shock of landmines. This weapon, however, is not the next advancement. It takes us back to basics. It’s a sword – but it’s a very special sword.

  In the auction world, there’s a category of objects termed ‘celebrity memorabilia’. Such items may fetch very high prices or be museum pieces because they animate a famous person’s life and times. This steel sabre belonged to an historic personage. We know that because it has ten characters etched into its blade, just under the pommel. The writing is in a style that’s quite the opposite of cursive script – these are the same unusually angular characters that we saw on the barrel of our blunderbuss (see Object 30). It was difficult to write on this hard steel, so the etcher was unable to curve his strokes. Nevertheless, the inscription transforms this one-metre-long, 430-year-old Ming Dynasty sword into a special weapon that hung from the belt of Qi Jiguang (1528–1588) sometime after 1581, the tenth year of the Wanli Emperor’s reign, when it was cast.