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Essay on The Great Wall Of China
Great Wall of China is a popular name for a semi-legendary wall built to protect China's northern border in the 3rd century BC, and for impressive stone and earthen fortifications built along a different northern border in the 15th and 16th centuries AD, long after the ancient structure had disappeared. Ruins of the later wall are found today along former border areas from Bo Hai (a gulf of the Yellow Sea) in the east to Gansu Province in the west.
The Great Wall is visited often near Beijing, at a site called Ju-yong-guan, and at its eastern and western extremes.
Perhaps China's best known monument-even national symbol-the Great Wall is not what most people imagine it to be. The existing wall is not several thousand years old, nor is it, as is widely asserted, visible from outer space (astronauts confirm this). Indeed, the Great Wall is not even a single, continuous structure.
Rather, it consists of a network of walls and towers that leave the frontier open in places (Lesley, 2002).
Wall building-around houses and settlements and along political frontiers-began in China more than 3000 years ago. Using the hang-tu method, pounded layers of earth were alternated with stones and twigs inside wooden frames to produce durable earthen walls. During the Warring States period (403-221 BC), before China was unified, feudal states fought for control of the area constituting most of modern-day China (Lesley, 2002).
The states of Qi, Yen, and Zhao were among those that built earthen ramparts along their frontiers.
The most famous early wall construction is attributed to the king of the Qin dynasty, who conquered the other states and unified China in 221 BC. Taking the title of Shihuangdi, or First Emperor, Qin Shihuangdi ordered his military commander Meng Tian to subdue the nomads....
