Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  As the sky reddened in the west, they reached T. XV, from where Stein could clearly see the next watchtower in the string; he estimated it to be three miles (five kilometres) distant by line of sight. While the availability of water was a logistical consideration that influenced the placement of watchtowers, it was becoming clear to Stein that the towers were located on higher ground so they could be linked visually, a system he later described as ‘optical telegraphy’.

  It had been some weeks since Stein’s caravan had reached and resupplied at the Dunhuang oasis, where the name of the Han Dynasty garrison town had been discussed. It translated as ‘Blazing Beacons’ – a reference to the beacon signals that were relayed along the fortifications to warn of enemy action. Archaeological evidence was backing up that interpretation: Stein had found some ‘queer little mounds’ beside T. XIII – five large bales of reeds, which he’d worked out were faggots to be ignited as signalling beacons. At a number of towers he’d found mujian, with two flat faces; in time, they would reveal details of ancient signalling ‘codes’ (see Object 15).

  Somewhat more puzzling was the discontinuity of the ‘agger’, as Stein first called the Wall. Having followed it for several weeks, he was beginning to wonder whether its apparently fragmented layout could be explained solely by disintegration over the centuries. He was becoming convinced that the structure’s route, and its long gaps, had a relationship to the terrain. He’d been marking these on his map: ‘Sai’ (bare, stony plateaus or sandy patches), ‘Togruk jungle’ (Euphrates poplar forest), the scrub of ‘Tamarisk cones’, tussocks of ‘Kumush’ (tall savannah grasses) and trouble-some marshy ‘Nullahs’.

  Badakhshi was invaluable in sensing the dangers of the marshes. He’d stop, back off or veer away as soon as his hooves sensed moist, sagging ground. Tila Bai’s gestures implied that no horse would ever traverse a ‘Nullah’, for fear of sinking. It had surely always been the case: not even the Huns, twenty-one centuries earlier, could get through these marshes on horseback, and without equine transport they were impotent.

  Stein speculated that ‘Chinese engineers’, as he called the Wall builders, had saved on labour and materials by incorporating these marshes into their defence plan. Meanwhile, he noted that the building of the Wall ‘had been carried out unfailingly over every bit of firm ground capable of offering a passage for the enemy’s inroads and right down to the edge of marshy inlets’.

  Men and beasts alike were relieved to return to the high ground of a rocky ‘Sai’, from where the position of Fort Camp reappeared. It was dramatically marked by its campfire’s leaping orange flames. In the final furlong they trotted across firm ground; a plume of steam was a welcome sight. Stein rocked his horse to a canter before reining him to a halt, sprang out the stirrups and strode directly over to the fire. He was eager to check that the fire was burning on dung and tamarisk, and not on ‘rubbish’, as the labourers had at first called the various wooden objects from the past that Stein had found lying in quantity around all the towers.

  The day’s finds were laid out on a table: another clutch of painted wooden slips unearthed by Chiang Ssu-Yeh, Stein’s field secretary and principal interpreter, who had been working with the Indian surveyor Naik Ram Singh at T. XIIa in the west. However exciting these were – some showed Aramaic script – Stein put his own cartographic duties first. He retreated to the privacy of his closed tent – his ‘purdah’, as it was jokingly referred to – and got to work.

  He opened his pocket notebook, dipped his fountain pen in the ink and began to write:

  April 18, 37 F, light haze, E breeze. Sent Naik & Sieh back to finish T. XIIa. Set out with Tila for T. XIV. To NE across great depression two Pao T’ais visible, prob. XV and XVI. A little to S. of them but further off binocular shows some large ruin (?). No sign of buildings to N or NW. To S240W across two marshy Nullahs, a small tower, approx. in line with T. XIII, latter clearly visible; perhaps also T. XII. The two Nullahs seem to contain a good deal of Toghruk jungle. Fort with camp E165S about 2 ½ m. off in straight line.

  Next he focused on his map, much of which had already been sketched out in pencil. Based on the day’s observations, he used his dividers and protractor to amend the positions of T. XVI and T. XVII – which he described as a ‘palace-like ruin’ – half a mile (0.8 kilometre) south, and a little further apart.

  Stein inked over his pencil marks, using some of the cartographic symbols he had learned during a compulsory but useful year’s stint in the Hungarian military in 1885–86, spent in the forested hills surrounding his native Budapest. As a young man of twenty-three, he had already studied the ancient Persian and Sanskrit languages, and gained valuable curatorial experience in three of Great Britain’s finest institutions: Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and Bodleian Library, and the British Museum. He revelled in his posting at the army’s Ludovika Academy’s school of cartography, where he mastered the science of field surveying and the art of drawing maps. He used his accurate watch to roughly measure the longitude and a quadrant to measure the latitude – using the North Star by night or the solar zenith by day – and an altimeter for elevation and plane-table for distances. He appreciated the fundamental importance of fieldwork to the making of maps, especially in places for which no others existed.

  DESCRIPTION: Sketch map in ink of the Western Han Great Wall

  SIGNIFICANCE: The basis for the publication of the first detailed ‘large-scale’ map of Han Wall, showing the positions of remnant Wall, watchtowers and surrounding terrain

  ORIGIN: Drawn in the field in April 1907 by Aurel Stein (1v862–1943), British explorer and archaeologist

  LOCATION: The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (MS Stein 199 fol. 29)

  Soon into his fieldwork on the ‘Chinese Limes’, as he later preferred to call the Han Wall, Stein had decided that ‘a large-scale map was needed to show properly and accurately express this intricate figuration of the ground’. He used red ink to denote sections of the Wall, the locations of the various watchtowers and the routes he had taken. Finally, he added a red triangle to mark the position of Fort Camp. The finished work was combined with eleven other small maps to produce the large-scale map. In time, this became a half-metre-long fold-out in volume three of the detailed report of his Second Chinese Expedition, Serindia, published in 1921, some fourteen years after he had completed his sketch map that night at Fort Camp.

  Stein’s masterpiece – titled Detailed Map of Ancient Chinese Limes West of Tun’ Huang, surveyed by Sir Aurel Stein and R. S. Ram Singh – plots the locations of thirty-eight towers spanning what was, in 1907, a completely uninhabited void. Covering 6240 square kilometres, it was the most detailed map of any Great Wall, and would only be equalled in its accuracy by the work of Chinese surveyors in the 1980s.

  Assessing Stein’s fieldwork and archaeological follow-up on the Han Wall in her 1995 biography Aurel Stein: Pioneer of the Silk Road, Annabel Walker wrote:

  In contrast to the callous calculation of his approach at the Dunhuang caves [from where he obtained large quantities of manuscripts through purchase and pressure], his method here [on the Wall] was a model of integrity. There was no treasure likely to emerge from the haunts of poor soldiers . . . the wealth of the wall lay in its abundant antiquarian evidence: details of the soldiers’ lives, of the way the wall had operated and of the topographical considerations that influenced its construction. A site could hardly have been devised to attract Stein more, with his interest in both historical and geographical factors and his ability to synthesize the two. He was absorbed by a desire to understand as much as possible about the place.

  Stein’s legacy lay waiting to be appreciated by those few explorers and Wall scholars who would follow him across this same desert. A century on, in 2006, I was one of them: his ‘large-scale’ map was my guide as I made my way to the fortifications he had photographed and numbered. My mission was ‘rephotography’ (see Object 50) – a desire to document any changes with my camera.

 
; As I did, I used my GPS to record the precise locations of Stein’s sites. This revealed the extraordinary accuracy of his 1907 mapmaking. I found that his Fort Camp, which he later evidenced as being the Jade Gate mentioned in Han documents, lay within a radius of just one kilometre of its true position, as pinpointed by today’s satellite technology.

  15.

  Alarms from the North

  Wooden records bearing signalling instructions

  If you wanted to communicate with your descendants, 2000 or so years in the future, how might you do it? By leaving them a message of some sort. The type of message you leave, what you write with and on, and the place you leave it and the future human activity in the vicinity will be major factors that determine whether or not your message gets through.

  This fascinating object presents specific advice on maximising your chances of success; it speaks from experience. If you write with ink on wood, it suggests, and bury your message in a desert like the Gobi, it will have a very good chance of being received and understood some 2000 years on.

  Our object is composed of seventeen interlinked wooden strips, mujian, bearing 600 characters. It unfurls as a large booklet and reads as a regional signalling code. Daytime alarm signals were made by hoisting peng (lantern-shaped bales of straw), by igniting bales of yan (vegetation to make smoke) or by biao (the raising of one or more flags). Night-time signals were made by ju (flaming torches), while jixin (igniting faggots) could be used at any time.

  The booklet is exactly the same size of my Macbook Air when opened fully flat, measuring thirty centimetres in width and forty centimetres in length. It has a remarkable resemblance to the character ce – 册 – a pictograph dating back to the earliest Chinese writing, dating from the Shang, found on oracle bones, which suggests that around 3500 years ago the Chinese were already using long, thin strips of wood, often bamboo, as a medium on which to write. However, rather than showing only two adjoined strips, as the character does, this booklet has seventeen. And instead of being ‘bound’ with one string, it has three.

  Dubbed Saishang Fenghuo Pingyue, or ‘Regulations on Frontier Beacon Signalling’, by the team of archaeologists who unearthed it in 1974, this object belongs to a distinct category of mujian, historical texts called hanjiandu, or ‘Han Dynasty border documents’. Following their initial discovery and investigation by Sir Aurel Stein in 1907 (see also Object 14), these wooden records were unearthed in their tens of thousands at various archaeological digs throughout the twentieth century, primarily in the vicinities of the watchtowers strung out along on the Western Han Wall.

  The population of Han China was enormous – around 60 million – while that of the nomadic peoples to the north was around 1 million. The latter chose where to strike, and possessed superior cavalry and archers. For the Chinese, having enough soldiers in the right place at the right time to fend off an attack was difficult, so they created a system that allowed them to deploy reinforcements in response to special signals. The plan relied on literacy skills, wood availability and messengers.

  Archaeologist Wei Jian of Renmin University, in Beijing, directed an excavation between 1999 and 2002 along the line of frontier watchtowers of the Juyan region, north of the Hexi Corridor, which discovered more than 500 such wooden documents. ‘After Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian and The Official History of the Western Han, the large quantity of Han wooden slips found in Gansu and Inner Mongolia provide vivid insight into frontier fortifications and their operation; using excavated mujian to reconstruct episodes of Han border life is a possibility,’ he said.

  DESCRIPTION: Seventeen interlinked mujian, or wooden border documents, bearing 600 characters

  SIGNIFICANCE: A record of the regulations for frontier signalling

  ORIGIN: A Western Han Dynasty frontier watchtower, Juyan region, circa 110 BC; excavated in 1974 from ‘T44 F16’ at Pochengzi, in today’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region

  LOCATION: Gansu Provincial Museum, Lanzhou

  To make sense of this booklet, we first need to know the local geography of Juyan. This Xiongnu word refers to a 250 kilometre by sixty kilometre area of fortifications with a north-east to south-west orientation in today’s Ejina Banner of Inner Mongolia, which adjoined those in the Hexi Corridor. The watchtowers were built approximately 1.3 kilometres apart. The ‘outside’ is to the left, or north-west, but there is no actual wall as such between the towers. Rather, the multiple channels of the Ejina River were borrowed as natural defences. For administrative purposes, the region was subdivided into three stretches from north to south: Tianbei, Jiaqu and Sanshijing. The personnel manning the towers here were on the very front line, and were required to report any Xiongnu activity immediately to the regional military headquarters in the hinterland, Juyan Dusiwei. We can be certain that this booklet was created there – from a template.

  A high-ranking officer would have written out a master copy. Next came the copying out, a job for several of the lower-ranking but literate officers (see Object 12). The text states that all the regulations were to be memorised by all personnel. To comply, every tower was issued with one ‘textbook’, meaning a total of several score were required. A large quantity of wooden strips had to be cut and trimmed, using locally available woods – some hongliu, or tamarisk, some huyang, or Euphrates poplar, and some suosuo or saksaul.

  Using thin brushes (also found by the archaeologists), the production group began their task. Our officer writes: ‘Xiongnuren baitian ru . . .’ (‘When the Xiongnu approach during the daytime . . .’) in a vertical manner – a directional practice dictated by the slip’s elongate shape. This mode of writing – from top to bottom, from right to left – was used for Chinese until recent decades.

  Strip after strip they wrote – it took seventeen to contain the entire code. The men began to know it themselves – almost. When the writing was finished, they had to bind the strips together in sequence with a twisted hemp string, set by set, ensuring that the order was correct. There was likely a cursory inspection, but no real proofreading. The completed booklets were delivered by messengers. Each roll’s strip bore the marks of a ‘top-priority’ document: a black dot at the top.

  At a tower on the Jiaqu section, the men gathered around their suizhang, or tower commander, to hear him read the code aloud. ‘Juyan Dusiwei orders requires all of us here at Pochengzi to learn by heart the signals we need to make!’ he said. The men recited the words after him: ‘Xiongnuren zhouru . . . When the Xiongnu approach by day, hoist two peng lanterns and ignite one jixin bale. Xiongnuren yeru . . . When the Xiongnu approach at night, ignite one jixin bale and sustain the signal until daybreak.’

  Other towers in the Juyan region had slightly different signals, which were specified in their own copies of the signalling code. The design of local signatures ensured that headquarters could receive a signal and know which section was under threat, and organise an appropriate response.

  Poets of later dynasties lamented that ‘beacon fires on the Han Wall burned incessantly’ (see Object 22), yet despite the border unrest this signified, it was actually rebellion from within that toppled the Han, early in the third century. Juyan, a hostile field on the Gobi’s edge, saw its fortifications abandoned, left for the desert to claim. Sand blew, swamping the Han’s past there, covering the towers’ history for nearly two millennia, until the arrival of twentieth-century archaeologists with their trowels and brushes.

  Their excavations of these mujian allow us to glean vivid details about Han frontier operations. We have no such detailed insight on the Ming Wall (which is fifteen centuries younger) because paper had replaced the use of wooden strips, and paper struggles to survive the centuries unless carefully stored.

  For us, though, these border documents relay another relevant signal. Although the communications devices we use today are remarkably quick – to write, to send and to receive messages – it’s difficult to see how they can possibly survive the tests of time and reach our descendants 2000 y
ears from now.

  16.

  A Han-Hun Wedding

  Lady Wang Travels Beyond the Wall marriage print

  The Economist magazine ranked Melbourne as ‘the world’s most liveable city’ in 2014. Two thousand years ago, the choice might well have been Chang’an, for to live in the Middle Kingdom at that time, was, in name and practice, to live at one of the world’s great epicentres. During the late first century BC, the population of the Han capital at the eastern end of the Silk Road was nearing half a million. It was one the world’s largest metropolises, and thus a magnet for those who wanted to be the best.

  Men and women migrated to Chang’an. But the empire that this sophisticated city claimed to control was not as safe as it seemed. As they had done since the time of their own establishment, in the very late third century BC, the federated Xiongnu people threatened the frontier. Only Han Wudi, who reigned from 141 to 86 BC, had stood up to them offensively, pushing them well back, constructing defences and keeping the border secure, if at immense financial cost. All other Han emperors had submitted to the Xiongnu’s demands for goods. They were forced to buy peace to keep the Xiongnu ‘outside’, north of the Han’s lengthy fortifications.

  This is where Wang Zhaojun enters the Wall story. She would become the most prominent imperial feminine ‘seal’ of a three-point appeasement policy known as Heqin, or ‘harmonious marriage alliances’, which the Han used repeatedly in order to avoid costly war and almost certain military defeat.

  DESCRIPTION: Wang Zhaojun Chusai, or Lady Wang Travels Beyond the Wall, a print of approximately sixty centimetres by thirty-five centimetres

  SIGNIFICANCE: Centrepiece of the Heqin, or ‘harmonious marriage alliance’ policies between the Han and the Huns