The Great Wall: The Extraordinary Story of China's Wonder of the World

by John Man

Overview

The Great Wall of China is a wonder of the world. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists take the five-mile journey from Beijing to climb its battlements. While myriad photographs have made this extraordinary landmark familiar to millions more, its story remains mysterious and steeped in myth. In this riveting account, John Man travels the entire length of the Great Wall and across two millennia to find the truth behind the legends. Along the way, he delves into the remarkable and complex history of China -- from the country's tribal past, through the war with the Mongols, right up to the modern day when the Great Wall is once more a commanding emblem of China, the resurgent superpower.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786731770
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	08/04/2009
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

John Man is a historian and travel writer with a special interest in Asia. His many acclaimed books include bestselling biographies of Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun, as well as The Great Wall and The Terracotta Army. He lives in the United Kingdom.

Table of Contents

List of Maps     vii
A Note on Spelling     ix
Acknowledgements     xi
Introduction: The Wall of China Does Not Exist     1
Earth
The First Emperor's Less-than-Great Wall     15
The Wall's Everywoman     37
A Threat from the North     51
War over the Wall     62
The Wall Goes West     77
Wall-hunt in the Gobi     103
The Concubine and the Barbarian     118
Losing the Lost Legion     125
A Grassland Mystery     138
Stone
The Coming of the Mongols     155
Disaster at Tumu     179
To the Ordos, and Beyond     197
Guarding the Way West     216
The Centre Ground     225
Climbing around Beijing     244
The End of the Wall, the End of the Ming     274
The Wall Reborn     295
Dates and Dynasties     317
Bibliography     319
Picture Acknowledgements     325
Index     327

Editorial Reviews

According to Man, in his second book this year after Terra Cotta Army, China's Great Wall is really a series of walls, part stone, part rammed earth, that were built in different eras and do not form a continuous line. Traveling the wall end to end from Mongolia to Lanzhou, the capital of China's Gansu province, Man learns that the first Great Wall sprang from the towering ambition and brutal policies of the first emperor, Zheng, who around 214 B.C. repaired and joined up a collection of little walls totaling 2,500 kilometers in length. In 1138, China's Jin rulers built 4,000 kilometers of wall, but the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan, burst through the wall in the 13th century and stayed for 150 years. To ensure that they never returned, the 15th-century Ming Dynasty built its wall. Mao co-opted the wall, which no longer served any defense purpose, as a symbolic monument to the achievement of ordinary, suffering people. This engrossing and well-researched history of China's most famous architectural project whets the reader's appetite to tread in Man's footsteps. Photos, maps. (Sept.)

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Publishers Weekly

If you didn't get to China this summer, these two books will help make up for it. In his elegantly produced volume, Lindesay (founder, International Friends of the Great Wall; Alone on the Great Wall) pairs 72 historic 19th- and early 20th-century photographs of sites along the Great Wall with his own beautiful and informative photos of the same views taken when he revisited the sites in the last few years. Sometimes there is great change, other times little at all. Lindesay provides graceful essays on the lives of the earlier photographers and histories of the local communities around the sites, often with maps, excerpts from the writings of earlier visitors, or drawings.

Man's earlier books (e.g., The Terra Cotta Army: China's First Emperor and the Birth of a Nation) combine travel and history. His latest amounts to a readable history of relations between the Chinese dynasties and inner Asia as he tells of the various walls in successive periods. He also regales us with his adventures traveling along the present-day Great Wall. His tone is knowledgeable, breezy, and sometimes a little breathless as he skillfully debunks what is left of the myths about the wall-no, it cannot be seen from space with the naked eye. In fact, the wall is not an "it" but a "them," that is, not a single thing but a process whose length cannot be measured because it is composed of overlapping bits made at different times. Both books acknowledge and make good use of recent Chinese scholarship, and both are recommended for larger public libraries, with Lindesay's also appropriate for college and special collections.
—Charles W. Hayford

Library Journal

A learned, lively history of the Great Wall's evolution that cuts it down to size without diminishing its allure. No, you can't see it from the moon. Nor is it an unbroken, serpentine glory of many thousand kilometers, all dressed stone and watchtowers; much of it is simply rammed dirt, sometimes a yard high. As a stone curtain keeping the northern barbarians at bay it was more of a sieve, though it did have its military uses. Sinophile Man (The Terra Cotta Army, 2008, etc.) offers a close, informed reading of historical documents as well as his observations based on many hours spent Wall-side. What emerges is a shifting, kaleidoscopic portrait-cultural, geopolitical, symbolic-that puts the mighty edifice into perspective. Man suggests that the Great Wall started as an expression of Chinese expansionism, rather than protectionism. Under the First Emperor, as China moved from city-state to nation-state in the third century BCE, the Wall marked borders, but they were fairly porous; "its main function [was] to serve China's internal political purposes: to define itself, to declare its identity to itself-and to keep its own people in line." The Han dynasty added to the Wall, which by the first century BCE also served as a road to transport goods, provide traders with safe houses and garrison soldiers. The pastoral-nomadic Mongols had no use for it and let it decay during the 12th century. After pushing them from power, the Ming dynasty embarked on a 200-year building spree designed to keep the Mongols on the other side of the Wall. The author's intent is not to diminish the Wall, but to ascertain its purposes and paint its many attitudes, from rude earth-and-reed bulwark to the fairy-taleadornment of the landscape. Man presents readers with a Wall for every season, even more awe-inspiring in its workaday clothes than in its romantic garb.

Kirkus Reviews

Publishers Weekly, 7/7/08
“This engrossing and well-researched history of China’s most famous architectural project whets the reader’s appetite to tread in Man’s footsteps.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A learned, lively history of the Great Wall’s evolution that cuts it down to size without diminishing its allure…A shifting, kaleidoscopic portrait—cultural, geopolitical, symbolic—that puts the mighty edifice into perspective…Man presents readers with a Wall for every season, even more awe-inspiring in its workaday clothes than in its romantic garb.”
Augusta Metro Spirit
“In a well-crafted narrative blending actual experience with historical data, John Man offers a fascinating view…Man once again breathes fresh life and interest into the old stone fragments that dominate our visions of the past.”
Library Journal, 10/01/08
“If you didn't get to China this summer, [this book] will help make up for it…A readable history…[Man] regales us with his adventures traveling along the present-day Great Wall. His tone is knowledgeable, breezy, and sometimes a little breathless as he skillfully debunks what is left of the myths about the wall…Acknowledge[s] and make[s] good use of recent Chinese scholarship…Recommended.

From the Publisher