Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  Faithfully, the editor supported this approach, commissioned the series and named it ‘Great Wall 50’; two pieces would run each month for twenty-five consecutive issues. By signing on the dotted line, I committed to delivering on deadline every month for over two years. I readied myself to go out to dozens of locations, with the aim each time of becoming intimately acquainted (or sometimes reacquainted) with an object. If things went to plan, the trips would combine to allow a procession of personages to tell their object’s place in the famous structure’s story.

  Four months before ‘Great Wall 50’ was to begin, my wife, Wu Qi, and I had a brainstorming walk on paths winding up to the Wall from our farmhouse. We discussed all aspects of the project: whether to call them ‘objects’, ‘antiquities’ or even ‘people’? Exactly how would I do the work – or, rather, how would we do it, because Qi would be working closely with me, as translator and researcher?

  While most things on my wish list were antiquities or cultural relics, there were some anomalies. And while many were related closely to a nameable individual, some were anonymous. Besides, how had I come to know these people? In most cases it was via the object they created, not vice versa. If I used the term ‘antiquity’, how might I justifiably include something as fascinating as wolf smoke, which was intangible and momentary? The all-encompassing term ‘object’ seemed to be the safest option, because anything and everything is an object.

  From midsummer 2012, our lives began to revolve around the Great Wall 50 project. As translator, Qi’s work – a blend of rewriting, rearranging and cross-cultural crafting – required regular discussions of each object’s qualities and significance from both our perspectives. A history major, she was also an admirably thorough researcher; Qi is a stickler for accuracy and consistency, so her work also functioned as an invaluable cross-check.

  Each month we admitted two relatively unknown objects – sometimes complete strangers – into the study of our home in Beijing. Four weeks later they would become familiar, things we knew well, by which time we were ready to pass what we had written about them to our good friend and historical advisor Wang Xuenong, emeritus curator of the Shanhaiguan Great Wall Museum. After going back and forth on historical points with him, we would submit the two works to Evelyn Rao at National Geographic, for her editorial touches prior to publication.

  The series launched in the magazine’s September 2012 issue, telling the very contrasting stories of how foreigners and Chinese commonly first learned about the existence of a ‘Great Wall’. This pairing formed part of a longer introduction, to be followed by objects arranged chronologically, according to the stories they told, although not always strictly based on their dates of production, up to the modern era. The approach produced the five collections of objects you will meet in the five parts of this book.

  Of all my Great Wall travels, the journey I took in visiting my fifty objects for this virtual exhibition was the longest, and the most unusual. These objects touch upon every episode of the Wall’s history, and reach into every important era of China’s past and present. They reveal how the Great Wall was built, operated, attacked, abandoned, regarded, mythologised, misunderstood, explored, mapped, photographed and politicised – and how it became a worldwide story. Although I didn’t realise it at the outset, by the journey’s end I had compiled not just my own personal history of the Great Wall, but also a Great Wall personnel history.

  Here it is, then, the book that is the result of the leap I took, the detours I made, the objects I saw and the people I met: The Great Wall in 50 Objects.

  William Lindesay

  March 2015

  Part One

  Survey: Eight Keys

  Objects from various dates

  When I hike with ‘first footers’ up to a section of Wild Wall, as opposed to those parts of it tamed for tourists and rebuilt with steps, I’m often asked during the final stage of our approach: ‘How are we actually going to get up onto it?’ Indeed, you can’t just ascend such an edifice anywhere. You need to know where, for example, a collapse might provide a place you can clamber up, or where there are safe footholds.

  As we start our journey, even though it is ‘off-Wall’, the question ‘Where should we begin?’ is equally valid. It’s just as important to find an accessible entry point to the story of the Great Wall, to ensure we successfully find our way onto the right path.

  For this reason, I’m not starting off with the oldest objects relating to the Wall. Rather, I’ve selected eight key objects – of various ages, and not in any order – that will help to answer our most important questions as we set out: How did we hear about the Wall? Who was it built for? What was it built with?

  Understanding these objects will prepare us for the journey ahead. We’ll make a more or less chronological traverse of the Wall’s 2000-year-long operational history. For now, though, and for once, time isn’t important.

  1.

  On Reaching Europe

  Abraham Ortelius’ Theatre of the World atlas

  Imagine, four centuries ago, someone setting off on a long journey. What might they have taken to help them to communicate, and make a statement about themselves, their country, their society, and their place in the world? The English navigator Sir Francis Drake spent three years sailing around the world, from 1577 to 1580. In his cabin we would have found a copy of the world’s first atlas.

  The first edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum had been published in 1570 in Antwerp, today’s Belgium, by Abraham Ortelius. It was a geographical revelation, depicting the world in a shape and form that would be recognisable by someone today. This book not only helped Drake voyage around the world, it also showed those with whom he shared it what the rest of the world was like and where he came from. It demonstrated that people of all regions were part of the same world.

  Two decades after Drake’s expeditions, in 1601, the Italian Jesuit missionary Father Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) arrived in Beijing. In order to honour the reigning Wanli Emperor (who ruled from 1572 to 1620), as well as to promote European knowledge and convince his imperial majesty that a superior understanding of the world was granted by God to his followers, Ricci had prepared some gifts. Included was a copy of the Ortelius atlas.

  DESCRIPTION: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or Theatre of the World, an atlas published by Abraham Ortelius (1527–98)

  SIGNIFICANCE: Considered the first world atlas; contains the first internationally published map of China and image of the Great Wall

  ORIGIN: Antwerp, Belgium, 1584

  LOCATION: Private collection of Maarten Buitelaar, Beijing

  Why did this giant of books attract such intellectually elite customers?

  Never before had anybody put maps of so many different nations together within two boards. Placing countries side by side opened up a new era: people could discover a new world, beyond what they could see with their own eyes. Other countries existed. Ortelius’ atlas was a showcase of contemporary knowledge, paving the way to the future.

  Ortelius’ success relied on him having a network of informants capable of collecting the latest geographical observations from around the world. Mariners, merchants and missionaries were propelled, respectively, by a curiosity to explore, by the need for new raw materials, and by Rome’s desire to convert the benighted to Christianity, adventures which defined the 1500s as the core century of the Age of Discovery. People with very different goals, but all of them travellers, returned with (or sent back) observations, hearsay, reports and knowledge that had been collected by Ortelius’ team.

  In the early 1580s, a Spanish Benedictine monk named Arius Montanus, an Orientalist, visited Ortelius’ atelier in Antwerp carrying a manuscript map of China. The scroll thus completed the final stage of its long journey, over several years and through many careful hands.

  The Spaniard had been entrusted with the precious scroll by Luiz Jorge de Barbuda, a Portuguese geographer who had summarised what was known of Ming China by Jesuit brothers who
had lived in Macao since 1557. With embellishments and supplementary information, including extracts from a Spanish booklet on China, published in Seville in 1570 by the Jesuit Bernadino Escalante, Ortelius drew up his first China map. He premiered it in the 1584 edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

  Four hundred and twenty five years later, I feel privileged to examine a copy of the ‘Theatre’, which covers half of my large desktop. It’s almost an arm in length and two hands in width, and it’s a clenched fist in thickness. It’s heavy. It is bound in thick, darkbrown, leather-covered boards. In turning its pages, I’m travelling during the most exciting time in history for any geographer. As I do, I wonder what the first owner of this atlas thought when he saw certain maps. Iceland, for example, shows a volcano, Hekla, blowing its top, spouting red lava, and the seas around this glaciated hell are inhabited by all kinds of monsters. How did one distinguish between the map’s fact and fiction?

  ‘Arriving’ in China might have prompted similar concern: there, a wall arced across the north of an empire, and beneath it was a sentence in Latin which translates as: ‘A wall of 400 leagues [1800 kilometres] between the banks of the hills, built by the King of China against the attacks of barbarians.’ Would viewers of this map really have believed that a wall, a structure normally built around cities, had been constructed in such an extraordinary manner?

  The annotation in Latin explained its basic function, and symbols showed that it was replete with towers or guard stations. And the segmented line of the structure – wall, mountain range, wall – showed that its strategists had ‘borrowed the mountains’ and incorporated natural features such as cliffs into their defence plan.

  True or false, partly or wholly, this China map was a milestone, even then. It was the first map of China ever published in the West, and contained the first internationally published and widely seen image of the Great Wall. Chinese woodblock-printed maps had shown the structure during the Southern Song Dynasty in the twelfth century (see Object 21) but they had only limited domestic circulation. In contrast, ‘Theatres’ containing China maps sold an estimated 5425 copies in six languages across Western Europe over twenty-eight years.

  In 2002, as I became increasingly concerned at the destruction of the landscape quality of the Great Wall to the north of Beijing by the encroachment of development, I nominated the ‘Wallscape’ of the Beijing Municipality to be recognised as an endangered site by the World Monuments Fund. Needing to promote the notion that the Wall was as much a part of China’s geography as of its history, I submitted this map as early published evidence of the Great Wall as a landscape feature.

  The Ortelius atlas is a monumental book that gave the world beyond China and neighbouring lands its first tantalising, and amazing, view of the Wall. In Europe’s mapmaking centres, as the decades passed, it was upgraded in cartographic stature, from a curious, semi-mythical feature to an established geographical detail; by the early eighteenth century it was a scientifically mapped landmark (see Object 42).

  In keeping with this emergence, it underwent name changes too, initially receiving a proper name – the Chinese Wall – and then, in recognition of its known scale, becoming the Great Wall. For succinctness, I often prefer to use a variation of Ortelius’ original term, converting his ‘wall’ into ‘the Wall’. The article and the capital combine well to express the structure’s uniqueness: it’s in a class of its own.

  2.

  A Place of No Return

  Meng Jiangnü’s Endless Search for her Husband woodblock print

  I’ve asked hundreds of Chinese people how they first heard about the Great Wall, and most tell me it’s from the legend of Meng Jiangnü. The heartbreak of the woman whose husband was conscripted to build the Great Wall has had millions of retellings – and undergone scores of alterations – over more than 1200 years. It has engaged the attention of the masses over these centuries as a teahouse tale, as a drum song chanted in villages, as poems recited in rural ‘culture stations’, and as operas sung and acted on stage. Nowadays you can even watch videos of the story on your mobile. I recently heard a less familiar rendition that is relevant to the preservation of the Wall today. It could be used to help save the monument from one of its most relentless modern attacks.

  Professor Wilt Idema, a Chinese literature scholar at Harvard University, recently authored a book on the diversiform legend: Meng Jiangnü Brings Down the Great Wall: Ten Versions of a Chinese Legend. He summarises: ‘The legend of Meng Jiangnü, the tale of the virtuous wife of Qi Liang, achieved its canonical version in Liu Xiang’s ‘Biographies of Exemplary Women’ (Lienü Zhuan). Qi Liang’s wife would only acquire the surname Meng during the Tang Dynasty, when the setting of the story was moved forward to the reign of the first emperor of Qin.’

  One aspect is common to all versions, as Professor Idema points out. ‘The legend is a classic tale of a tyrant’s folly, and variations mostly detail the moral turpitude of the First Emperor.’

  I will discuss two versions. The first is a Jiangnan or ‘Southern’ edition, as illustrated by our object: a coloured woodblock print. The second rendering, new to my ears and even to Professor Idema’s, I heard in Beijing’s suburbs. It gives the legend an eerie, present-day relevance.

  Printed and coloured by woodblocks cut and inked by Sun Wenya, a Shanghainese in the late Qing, circa 1890, as a Lunar New Year’s illustration, the ten-panel captioned print is designed to be viewed like a strip cartoon, column by column, from right to left.

  In (1) soldiers with an arrest warrant for Wan Xiliang (yes, a different name) arrive in Suzhou with orders to take him to the capital. A ‘wanted’ poster announces that a reward of 1000 liang of silver will be paid for his arrest. Apparently, the Emperor wants to exploit Wan’s labours in building the Great Wall, believing that his surname, which is a homonym of ‘ten thousand’, indicates that he’ll somehow magically provide the work of the same number of men. (Interestingly, Emperor Qin Shihuang was believed to have also executed all unfortunate subjects in his empire surnamed ‘Hu’ – which is a homonym for the generic term ‘barbarian’ – after a soothsayer predicted that ‘the Hu will topple the Qin’.)

  In (2) Wan Xiliang bids farewell to his parents and heads for Songjiang, becoming a fugitive, and (3) he takes refuge in a garden, where he chances on a view of Lady Meng bathing in her back yard. (4) The encounter is considered intimate because ‘a naked woman cannot be seen by two men’, and Lady Meng is faced with two choices – marriage or suicide. Fortunately, the couple love one another. (5) They marry, but soon after Xiliang’s luck runs out and he’s arrested, put in chains and marched off as a conscript to build the Great Wall.

  (6) Lady Meng prepares some winter clothes to take to him. (7) One night, the lonely wife has a nightmare that convinces her that Xiliang has died at the Great Wall. (8) Chinese ‘Valentine’s Day’, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, comes around, and Lady Meng is overcome with melancholy. (9) Bidding farewell to her parents, she heads north to search for her husband. (10) Lady Meng asks here, there and everywhere for her husband.

  What happens next? There’s only one sheet of the woodblock print in the British Library’s collection, leaving us on the edge of our seats. For the rest of the story we can refer to some well-known oral versions.

  When Lady Meng arrives at the Wall she’s told that Xiliang has died and been buried in the fill of the Wall. Her wails and tears cause the fortification to collapse, revealing his bones, which she gathers up. She’s arrested, taken to the imperial capital and sent before the Emperor, who decides not to execute her when he sees her beauty. She seduces the Emperor, persuading him to arrange a state funeral and erect memorial arches and temples in her husband’s name. With this achieved, she escapes, jumps in a river and is reunited with her beloved in heaven.

  It is from this legend that the majority of Chinese people, past and present, have heard of the Great Wall – not from the name of the emperor who built it, but from the name of a woman whos
e heart was broken by it. The story’s popularity created a belief that if a man was conscripted to work on the Wall, he would never return to his home town or to his wife. Consequently, the name of the Great Wall in Chinese, Wanli Changcheng, became a byword for a death sentence. This might explain why, in later dynasties, especially the Ming, the defences were simply called biancheng, or border defences, thus avoiding the original term’s connotations.

  DESCRIPTION: A coloured woodblock print entitled Meng Jiangnu's Endless Search for Her Husband, by artist Sun Wenya

  SIGNIFICANCE: Illustrates part of the most enduring legend of the Great Wall, by which most Chinese first learn about the monumental structure

  ORIGIN: Shanghai, China, circa 1890s

  LOCATION: British Library, London (OR 5896)

  And now a second version, which I heard in around 2002. After walking a section of Wall in Yanqing District, to the west of Badaling, I found a driver to take me back to Beijing. Inevitably, our talk turned to where I’d been, whereupon he asked: ‘Do you know the legend of Meng Jiangnü?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me your version?’ I said.

  His long story washed over me like an overly familiar pop song, becoming background music to my deeper thoughts of getting home and enjoying my wife’s home comforts. Then my ears pricked up at something the driver was saying. ‘. . . Lady Meng examined the names of the dead workers inscribed on the Wall’s bricks, and, there it was: Wan Xiliang.’

  At that moment, the reconstructed Great Wall at Badaling came into sight. Sardonically, I remarked that on virtually every brick of its ramparts, trodden by 8 million people each year, was etched the name of a tourist.