Great Wall in 50 Objects Read online

  After making enquiries, I visit an apartment cum workshop in a tenement block in Ulaanbaatar’s suburbs. Dozens of half-made bow frames hang on the walls. In a corner of the room is a pile of ibex horns. Bunches of deer sinews are hung up to dry. Perched on a bench rests a vulture’s wing, waiting to be plucked by a fletcher. Using a wheezing blowlamp, a young lad puts finishing touches to an arrowhead. I’ve found the closest thing to a medieval bowyer in today’s Mongolia: the bow and arrow workshop of Batmunkh and son.

  Batmunkh hands me one of his ‘unstrung’ bows. It’s about 1.5 metres long. One side is pale birch bark, naively decorated with black motifs, which cover the bow’s birch spine. The belly is marbled horn, with evenly spaced bands of fibrous strands – ten in total – covered by some kind of resin. Overall, the bow has a wavy form with two straight ends.

  I feel the weapon’s power as I’m taught to ‘string’ the bow. I’m sat down, knees apart, my palms facing upwards and at arm’s length. I’m instructed to grip both ends of the bow at the interfaces between its curvy limbs and straight ends, and pull it forcefully against my knees, which are positioned on either side of the bow’s leather handle.

  I pull, then I pull harder. The bow hardly flexes and my knees feel the force. I pull much, much harder, actually concerned that the bow might fracture; I’m using a great amount of strength now, and I’m uncertain whether the wood, let alone the horn, is capable of withstanding such stress.

  ‘Agh, you need to pull much harder!’ the Batmunkhs chorus.

  With my knees and abdomen braced for the big pull, I unleash my greatest effort, finally flexing the bow just enough to allow Batmunkh to seat the loops at either end of the bowstring in their notches. The shape of the bow has been completely transformed: it is now ‘recurved’. Holding it in my left hand, I see how its flat ends are angled away from me. I strum the bowstring – it’s extremely taut. The bow is now alive.

  Outside, in open space, I use my three middle fingers to draw the string. Batmunkh has told me this bow has a twenty-seven kilogram draw weight. That means drawing it is like lifting your check-in and carry-on bags together – with just three fingers. The recurve ‘unwinds’ and the bow appears to change from having two parts to just one. Its limbs lengthen, and the mechanical advantage of its unique construction begins to manifest itself. The stress in the bow’s limbs – the tension along its outside face, and the compression along its inside belly – will be transferred to the string at the moment of release.

  When I shoot, the arrow flies fast, high and far. Much faster, higher and further than my homemade bows ever fired. At 300 kilometres per hour the arrow arcs towards a target some sixty metres away.

  What I find amazing about this method of bow manufacture is the fact that laminating different materials together produces a weapon that is actually strengthened – to such an extent that it afforded the Mongols massive advantages over their enemies. According to Dr Gongor Lhagvasuren, deputy director of the Mongolian National Institute of Physical Education: ‘The stele of Genghis Khan explains in part the excellence of the Mongolian military and the reasons for their successful thirteenth-century campaigns.’

  I see the Mongolian composite bow as a product of necessity and environment, a masterpiece of materials and mechanics. Necessity drives invention, and the harsh steppe life was initially dependent on hunting. Hunters competed against the swiftness of animals and sought technical advantages to complement their stealth. A major advantage came in the form of the laminated bow, which contained materials that could withstand enormous stresses, and store and transfer energy efficiently.

  What’s the secret of the composite bow? I have experienced the weapon’s power on the shooting range, but I don’t fully understand it. Back in his workshop, Batmunkh talks me through the bow’s production, from one year ago. All the raw materials are laid out before me. The curved ibex horn and birch frame are familiar, but two others are not. These are thin, whitish fibres about ten to twelve centimetres in length, and dark brown vitreous blocks.

  Batmunkh holds the fibres and points to his lower calf. ‘These sinews are made from tendons – usually from deer. I cover the back of the bow with them, building up a layer that’s glued on with this animal resin.’ He points to the dark, vitreous blocks.

  Tendons link muscle to bone. They contain a collagen protein called elastogen, and have four times the tensile (stretching) strength of wood. Batmunkh lays the deer sinews along the outside length of the birch, giving immense tensile strength to the bow in the area of its greatest tension. This was exactly the point at which my own bows always broke.

  While tension creates the force along the bow’s back, its opposite – compression – is at its greatest on the bow’s inside, its belly. Batmunkh hands me sawn strips of horn, straightened out through boiling. This horn outperforms wood when compressed: it can yield four per cent, compared to wood’s one per cent.

  DESCRIPTION: Remains of a Mongol warrior’s composite bow

  SIGNIFICANCE:

  The most feared weapon in the Great Wall theatre of war for 2000 years

  ORIGIN: From the Genghis Khan Period, circa AD 1200

  LOCATION: Museum of the Great Hunnu Empire, Erdene, Ulaanbaatar; private collection of the late Mr Purevjav Erdenechuluun (access courtesy of Mrs Nemkhehbayer)

  On a finished bow, since the back is covered in tree bark for protection against moisture, you can’t see the sinewed back, nor the glued interface between the birch and the horn. But on the bow’s belly you can see thick horizontal bindings of glue-coated sinew, running the full length of the bow. These provide added strength and stability. It looks like fibreglass and is incredibly hard.

  Nomads discovered the existence and qualities – strength, elasticity and adhesiveness – of animals’ anatomical components as they butchered and cooked them. Nevertheless, it remains a mystery when and how they harnessed these qualities to craft weapons that gave them such advantages, in both hunting and warfare.

  In the Great Wall theatre of war, composite bows in the hands of Mongols, along with their brute strength and marksmanship, made the weapon decisively advantageous in long-distance combat manoeuvres on various battlegrounds, from overcoming their first resistance along what border walls existed at that time, built by the Jin and Western Xia dynasties, to besieging and winning walled towns and cities that lay ahead in their path. Bows were their old friends, stalwarts, whose fatal use put fear into their unfortunate foes, for no other archers could compete with the Mongolian’s composite bow, nor his strength and skill in using it.

  Part Two

  Foundations

  Objects from the third century BC to AD 221

  From around 300 BC, conflicts began to create a single China. The ruling regimes became fewer, and controlled larger territories and populations. By 221 BC, and for the first time, one man, Emperor Qin Shihuang, ruled a unified land. Scale featured in all his plans. City walls were firmly established urban structures, while long point-to-point defences were newcomers. Qin Shihuang’s vision was to link and extend the ‘long walls’ he had inherited from the former warring states into a single ‘Endless Wall’.

  His longevity, however, proved short. The Han Dynasty rose in 206 BC and extended their rule westward, and the Wall with it.

  The Qin–Han period saw the laying of state foundations, the beginning of ‘Chinese-ness’. Characters, coinage and cart-axle lengths were standardised, and dissidents destroyed. Society and urban life matured, the economy grew and transcontinental trade emerged along the Silk Road. Taxes were levied, censuses conducted, laws established and official histories compiled. Statecraft emerged.

  One Great Wall was built, and another upon it. They, too, were national foundation stones, strategic precedents, which would be built upon in perpetuity.

  9.

  The Iron Age Factor

  Mould for casting iron chisels

  I witnessed the process of iron smelting only a handful of times in my twenty-
five years at the Great Wall. The first occasion was the most striking, though at the time I didn’t realise its significance.

  I was wandering through a small fortified town tucked inside the ‘inner’ Great Wall of the Ming, in northern Shanxi Province: within a wall beside the Wall. Guangwu seemed to me to be a true enclave of antiquity, and more vividly so when I stumbled across a very ancient trade being practised there. Although it was 1995, I could have easily been observing a scene from 195 BC. Ironware was being remade from scrap.

  With some minor differences, the oil-drum furnace was a makeshift version of an ancient smelter, and to Chinese no doubt a reminder of the ‘backyard’ furnaces that were set up during the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, as China tried to increase its iron and steel production by melting scrap.

  What I saw was a very elemental process. An old man was using fire, wood, coal, air and water to melt metal and reshape it into something useful. He pumped a continuous stream of air into the base of this mini furnace, keeping the fire glowing orange. Inside the drum was a crucible containing the scrap metal to be melted. Finally, he poured the molten iron into rough moulds, and made some finishing touches with his simple tools.

  But since when have such tools been ‘simple’? Not since 500 BC or so.

  We think of pliers and hammers as everyday items. But watching this man at work made me realise that our ability to create such things was truly momentous. We find a heavier than usual rock – iron ore – and then heat it and melt it down, separating pure metal from other mineral impurities. Then we pour it into a container, casting it in the specific shape of a tool. Of course, the period in which humans made this discovery is known universally as the Iron Age.

  Our present object – an iron mould for casting two chisels – is one of the oldest featured in this series. It was excavated in 1953 at Gudonggou, not in Shanxi, where I intensely watched smelting for the first time, but in the neighbouring province of Hebei. It is displayed in the stunning permanent exhibition called ‘Ancient China’ at Beijing’s National Museum of China, although most visitors walk right past it.

  They are captivated instead by the older and more visually stunning ‘bronzes’ on display nearby. But those objects, although metal, are very different. They are gorgeous, and intricate. Being cast in bronze – an alloy of copper and tin – they were made mainly for ritual use, so were rarities even back then, in the Bronze Age.

  What I am looking at from Gudonggou is vastly different. It’s unattractive. It’s plain. It was a utility. And although iron is relatively plentiful, occurring as a high-grade ore, that made it extremely difficult to soften, let alone melt. This is what makes our object even more special technologically. It’s the earliest known iron mould for casting basic tools.

  This mould was found together with eighty-six other similarly utilitarian artefacts. Clearly, it was a cache of tools from a foundry, and it’s been dated to approximately 280 BC. Archaeologists in China have found scores of sites yielding ironware dating from circa 300 BC or earlier. They are widely distributed, from Guangdong in the south to Inner Mongolia in the north. Finds are scattered throughout the territories of the seven most powerful states of the Warring States Period (476–221 BC).

  DESCRIPTION: Iron mould for casting two chisels simultaneously; excavated in 1953 at Xinglong County, Hebei Province

  SIGNIFICANCE: Mass production of iron tools (harder and sharper), enabling large-scale construction projects

  ORIGIN: Made circa 280 BC at a foundry of the Yan State, about 100 kilometres north-east of today’s Beijing

  LOCATION: National Museum of China, Beijing

  The Iron Age was a worldwide revolution. It seems to have happened in numerous locations independently, sometimes sooner, sometimes later. But it was far from equal in quality. Today, there are approximately 3 million English-speaking people in North America, the United Kingdom and Australasia who have the family name Smith. As many Western names do, this one reveals the occupation of the first Smiths. The word smite of course means ‘to hit with a firm blow’, and that’s the way ‘smithies’ shaped iron ‘bloom’ (softened yet impure iron). In China, however, due to more advanced levels of innovation, iron could be melted and cast in the same way as bronze, despite the fact that iron has a much higher melting point. Casting of iron was achieved by the Chinese an astonishing 1000 years ahead of the West.

  How was it done? A constant blast of air was pumped into a furnace. Anyone who has kindled a campfire knows how gentle blowing nurtures the flames. Next, heat was sustained by advanced insulation, using heat-proof clays. Finally, the melting point of the iron ore was cleverly reduced by adding phosphoric-rich chernozem soil, or ‘black earth’, common in Manchuria, to the iron ore and charcoal mixture. These methods permitted early Chinese metallurgists to raise the temperatures of their ‘blast furnaces’ to around 1000 degrees Celsius and produce molten iron.

  In Europe, the spongey ‘bloom’ was the best that could be produced in a furnace; it then had to be hammered into shape by smithing. The product was rough. But in China, casting in moulds permitted the mass production of precisely shaped tools and other wares. Products were refined until they were perfect for the job, and this enabled large-scale building works to take place.

  But how might the iron mould itself react to contact with molten iron? Would it not crack, even melt, with the thermal shock? Professor Christopher Cullen, emeritus director of the (Joseph) Needham Research Institute at Cambridge University, a specialist in the history of science in China, explains: ‘A large piece of solid metal, which conducts heat relatively well, does not reach melting point just because some liquid metal above melting point is brought into contact with it. The mass of the mould is in general larger than the mass of the object cast in it.’

  This object’s function – the reproductive capability it permitted – is a milestone in technological innovation and had a marked impact on Great Wall building. Imagine how many chisels were cast using this mould, day after day, week after week, year after year. Operating at such scale, this tooling revolution opened a new frontier in construction.

  Previously, most Walls had been made by ramming earth to compactness. In some areas, surface stones were used as building materials. But the construction technique remained limited, due to a lack of tools with sufficient sharpness and tensile strength. Workers were unable to efficiently quarry small, manageable pieces of rock from large, immovable outcrops or rock faces. You couldn’t use a bronze tool to work a much harder stone surface. That changed during the middle years of the Warring States Period.

  As neighbouring states contested for wider power, battles were commonplace. Technology provided a greater array of weapons, some made from the new material of iron. Our iron mould can thus be seen as a technological response to a need for better defences. From the late fourth century BC to the early third century BC, many coexisting states built long walls; most were for ‘civil’ defence. While much of the lengths of these structures were made of earth and field stones, at least some appear to have been made in a new way, using quarried rock. The iron chisels produced at the Xinglong foundry may have been used to quarry rock in an area that corresponds to the Yan State, which was centred on today’s Beijing region.

  However, there was still one major problem to overcome before the true potential of iron tools could be unleashed, as Professor Cullen points out: ‘Simple “cold-casting” of iron produces a very hard but brittle high-carbon product that you would not want to hit hard with a hammer, or against anything hard, lest it should shatter. So if you want to cast an iron tool that will be useful, you need to heat-treat it carefully, which changes its microstructure so you get “malleable” iron.’ The Chinese did this from the fourth century BC.

  The Yan State is thought to have built defences that measured approximately 800 kilometres in total length. It’s an important structure because it was one of the three pre-existing long walls that, under Emperor Qin Shihuang’s orders, were j
oined together around 215 BC to form a structure that was described as a Wanli Changcheng, or Great Wall (see Object 11). The other two long walls were the Emperor’s own Qin State Wall and the Zhao State Wall, built by King Wuling (see Object 7).

  Remnants of the Zhao Wall can be found in the dry hills of the Wulaite Qianqi, north of Baotou in today’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Some sections are composed of angular blocks that appear to have been forcefully freed from rock faces using efficient tools, such as hammers and chisels. As I run my hands along that Wall’s sharp edges, I can feel the proximity of history, created by quarrymen using hard, strong and sharp iron tools produced twenty-three centuries ago.

  10.

  Sure Footing

  A bronze stirrup

  Cars and good roads are a relatively recent feature of life in China. Until the post-millennium car boom, most Chinese transported themselves on rickety bicycles via potholed roads. It’s something that most of us have experienced.

  Do you recall pedalling along and spotting a hole in the road ahead that was unavoidable? You probably ‘rode’ the bump by standing on the pedals and lifting yourself out of the saddle, thus avoiding the impact to your backside and spine. What you did was instinctively use your natural suspension. You let your leg muscles absorb the shock.