Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  A Russian envoy en route to Beijing in the early 1700s was told of the impact that Wall building had inflicted on its surroundings. ‘The building of the Wall there left no stone in the mountains, no trees standing, no water flowing in the streams,’ he wrote. Modern news reports have told of how Beijing’s orders for concrete and steel had producers worldwide scrambling to satisfy demand, running their plants 24/7 and sending prices spiralling upward.

  Construction then and now induced environmental blights without precedent. Ming China’s grand makeover of Beijing’s Wall saw the ravaging of a band of land several kilometres in width for its raw materials. Industrial landscapes intruded upon pristine ones. Forests were razed to obtain the timber that was needed to fuel brick and lime kilns. Fires belched acrid smoke, mixing with particulate rock dust from hundreds of quarries, creating a frontier-wide chain of devastation. Modern China’s Beijing makeover triggered a similar but nationwide quest for raw materials: coal, aggregates, cement, steel and glass. Kafka wrote of ‘forests being felled for scaffolding’ and ‘mountains being broken up into rocks’; the same is true today.

  Kafka’s Wall had been built piecemeal, section by section. After year five, builders were marched off home, passing other work in progress as they went, which enabled them to appreciate how their tiny effort was part of a grander, more important plan. They were treated heroically for a month or two, rejuvenated by home comforts, before returning to get on with the job – their jobs for life. In this way they changed the mountains, crowning them with battlements and towers, closing up the Wall’s gaps, multiplying its length, transforming skylines, making the battlement-like symbol on the map (which marks the Great Wall) longer and longer.

  Modern migrants, too, were watching the calendar. Kafka wrote of ‘armies of labour streaming up from the depths of the provinces’. At week fifty they downed their tools and packed up, for it was time to travel home for the Lunar New Year celebrations, taking with them their wads of cash, and much pride. They saw that their efforts were not only lauded locally on hoardings around the construction site. Distant from Beijing, en route and in their hometowns, they saw billboards exhorting the same messages as they alighted from buses and trains. In 2005 it was ‘New Beijing, Great Olympics’. In 2014 it is ‘My China Dream’. After a few weeks’ respite, their time was up.

  Of his workers’ return, Kafka wrote:

  The quiet life of home, where they spent some time, reinvigorated them. The high regard which all those doing the building enjoyed, the devout humility with which people listened to their reports, the trust which simple quiet citizens had that the wall would be completed someday—all this tuned the strings of their souls. Then, like eternally hopeful children, they took leave of their home. The enthusiasm for labouring once again at the people’s work became irresistible. They set out from their houses earlier than necessary, and half the village accompanied them for a long way. On all the roads there were groups of people, pennants, banners—they had never seen how great and rich and beautiful and endearing their country was. Every countryman was a brother for whom they were building a protective wall and who would thank him with everything he had and was for all his life. Unity! Unity! Shoulder to shoulder, a coordinated movement of the people, their blood no longer confined in the limited circulation of the body but rolling sweetly and yet still returning through the infinite extent of China.

  Max Brod’s overruling of his dear friend’s dying wish made Kafka, too, part of humanity’s bloodstream, a giant of twentieth-century Western literature. His works were put in a genre of their own, and the author was immortalised with the creation of an adjective to specifically describe his unique style: Kafkaesque.

  It might also describe the section of Great Wall which we go to in our minds when we read ‘At the Building of the Great Wall’. That place is called ‘Kafka’s Great Wall’.

  47.

  Back to the Wall

  Press photo from the Sino-Japanese War

  In the early summer of 1644, the ramparts of the Ming Great Wall became increasingly quiet, and they soon fell silent except for occasional thunderstorms and gales. The Wall’s watchtowers, former shelters, storerooms and signalling stations for old soldiers, were particularly eerie, as they are to this day, devoid of men, empty of water, food and weapons, looted of their wooden doors and window shutters, stripped of the engraved stone tablets that sat above their doorways. Yet in spite of these losses and departures, the buildings weren’t derelict in their duty. Most continued standing, as unarmed guards, their dark windows – yan, or ‘eyes’, as the Chinese call them – fixed on the north, as if doubtful that the last invaders had been and gone.

  Immediately upon its dynastic transfer from the Ming to the Qing, the Great Wall was abandoned. Then a slower transformation of ownership ensued: from order back to chaos.

  The prevailing attacks on the Wall came, as usual, from the north, but they weren’t overland as before, but airborne. Trillions of the finest particles of sediment, small and light enough to be lifted by desert winds, came down every spring, smearing a veneer of loess on the Wall’s surfaces. At first it was negligible, but over a century it amounted to an inch.

  Seeds also came by wind, or landing from above inside pods of fertiliser – bird droppings. Rainfall brought germination, sprouting and sustained growth, colonising all bare surfaces, every nook and cranny. First came lower grasses and simple plants; as the soil deepened, bushes and trees began to grow.

  Other processes, some faster, some sudden, contributed to Mother Nature’s and Father Time’s takeover. Summer storms brought deluges that made the fill sponge-like. Come winter, the moisture within froze and then expanded, prising out foundation blocks and triggering collapses. Occasional earthquakes rumbled, and lightning struck high points, especially the tops of towers. Bricks and mortar weathered, making the nearby soil alkaline. By the early twentieth century the Wall had become a walled garden, a unique wilderness. In autumn 1994 I coined the term ‘Wild Wall’ (a short form of ‘Wilderness Wall’) to describe the transition it had undergone.

  Except for village folk using it as a ridge pathway, or a special plant-hunting ground to collect lime-tolerant materia medica for traditional concoctions, the Wild Wall of the 1700s, 1800s and the early 1900s saw few people. Surreal and sublime, serene and sacred, it was unimaginable that this memorial garden would be violently awoken from its silence. Then, in 1933, history repeated. Chinese soldiers returned to the Wall, in many thousands, and it was drafted back into national service.

  A familiar story was about to unfold. In antiquity, Qidans, Jurchens and Mongols had first used the northern border regions of China as stepping stones on their way south to China’s heartland. The new invaders appeared to be following a similar plan, having annexed Manchuria in late 1931 with minimal opposition. Predictably, they too were China’s neighbours, but they were not descendants of the Huns, Mongols or Manchus. It was the Japanese, threatening China’s territoriality not for the first time.

  This anachronistic photograph of modern soldiers on the ancient Great Wall is one of many showing the armed conflict between Chinese and Japanese forces, and from it two important questions arise. The first asks how the occupation of a Ming Dynasty military defence, built 400 years earlier to stop cavalry and archers, could be of any use in the twentieth century against an army with machine guns, bazookas and motorised vehicles. The second, less obvious question is why the photograph was taken at all. Apart from simply recording the event, what purpose did it serve?

  Scrutiny of the photograph can only tell us part of its story. To learn more, we need to know exactly where it was taken and when, for it has neither caption nor date. I purchased it on eBay from a seller in the United States, which perhaps suggests that it was taken by a foreign news correspondent. Fortunately, I half-recognised the location. I scanned and reprinted it, and took it to Luowenyu (Zunhua County, Hebei Province) in 2010 to check. I was right – it was there. But it’s no wonder I
only half-recognised it, for three-quarters of the Wall in this location had gone.

  Records show that major fighting took place at Luowenyu on 17–18 March 1933. Battles also raged along the adjacent sections of the Wall during the first five months of that year, across a wide front from Gubeikou in the west to Luowenyu, Xifengkou, Dongjiakou, Yiyuankou and Shanhaiguan in the east. Consequently, the campaign became known as Changcheng Kangzhan, or ‘The Defence of the Great Wall’. It aimed to halt the advance of Emperor Hirohito’s Japanese army from its Manchurian foothold.

  Standing where the first gunner had stooped behind sandbags, I could look down into the deep, twisting valley to the east – Luowenyu. It was clear that this perch presented its occupants with two military advantages: a bird’s eye view and clear firing lines down to the valley below. If the Japanese plan for a successful southerly thrust was to make headway, they needed to win control of this and the adjacent strategic passes from the defending forces. Sun Tzu’s ancient stratagem from The Art of War remained timelessly relevant: ‘occupy the high ground and wait for the enemy to approach’. The Wall also offered other logistical benefits. Its towers were purpose-made barracks, which just needed a little patching up. And of course, the Wall was a mountain-top military road for moving troops to where they were needed and sending supplies. For these various reasons the Wall was reused.

  A less obvious but equally vital stratagem lay behind the production and distribution of this photograph, one that was set to become an essential feature of twentieth-century warfare – using the power of the press to win political support and help the allies. It went far beyond the basics of informing viewers about a world event. It spoke much louder. Widely distributed, it made a convincing appeal to the civilised world. Had I seen it back then, this photograph would have told me that ‘China was standing its ground, defending its Great Wall, in the face of outrageous Japanese aggression’. Seeing it would have made me take a side, and I would have stood against the belligerent. If we might paraphrase Sun Tzu’s stratagem, the purpose of the photograph was to ‘grab the headlines and wait for allies to approach’. Alliances, both established and new, would have major impacts in the Sino-Japanese War that was about to escalate and in the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II, of which it was a major part.

  Japanese presence sparked sudden (some say premeditated) ‘incidents’, which led to battles, the annexation of territory and a broader campaign along the line of the Great Wall in Eastern Hebei. A sustained war seemed inevitable.

  Japan annexed north-east China in the wake of the ‘September 18 Incident’ of 1931 at Mukden (today’s Shenyang). Lacking a national defence focus, the Kuomintang (Nationalist) government led by Chiang Kai-shek saw ‘the Japanese as a disease of the skin, the Communists a disease of the heart’. With little opposition, the Japanese seized the entire north-eastern region of China, pronouncing the foundation of ‘Manchukuo’. They enticed the last Qing emperor, the deposed Puyi, to return to his ancestral homeland and reside in a modern ‘palace’, and to be the ‘emperor’ again. The Sino-Japanese War of 1931–1945 was underway.

  DESCRIPTION: A silver gelatin print of Chinese soldiers at Luowenyu, Zunhua County, Hebei Province, preparing to repel a Japanese attack during the ‘Defence of the Great Wall’ military campaign, January–May 1933

  SIGNIFICANCE: The ancient Great Wall rejuvenated as national defence line

  ORIGIN: Photo taken in the spring of 1933, around early March

  LOCATION: Author’s collection, Beijing

  After Mukden, the next flare-up was the ‘Shanhaiguan Incident’ of January 1933, which developed into the Changcheng Kangzhan, or ‘Defence of the Great Wall Campaign’. Within days, Japan’s propaganda machine released photographs showing its troops waving the Rising Sun flag on the Great Wall at Shanhaiguan, hoping to hoodwink the world into believing they had conquered China. The campaign lasted just five months and resulted in temporary submission, but it did enable China to issue an international emergency call, and it circulated its own photographs of Chinese soldiers standing their ground on the Wall. At home, these images caused public outrage in the politically divided nation. The Chinese people were forced to ask themselves: are we Nationalists, Communists or Chinese?

  The Changcheng Kangzhan ended in a Japanese victory, and in its annexation of a second piece of the Chinese provincial jigsaw map, Jehol, the now-defunct province partly composed of today’s Hebei, Liaoning and Inner Mongolia. By signing the Tanggu Truce, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek ceded control of the Great Wall to the Japanese and recognised the existence of the Manchukuo state, before turning his attention inwards again.

  Chiang set his forces against the Workers’ and Peasants’ Army, which was led by Mao Zedong and Zhu De, encircling their ‘Soviet Republic of China’, a revolutionary enclave straggling the Hunan–Jiangxi provincial border. The Long March, a breakout and escape, ensued in 1934 and 1935, giving the Japanese war machine time to ready its army and air force for their next moves. In December 1936 China’s civil war was put on hold as a United Front Pact was signed between Nationalists and Communists: the nation’s forces would now confront the Japanese, not each other.

  Reportage on the war and the Republic’s lack of focus on the Japanese had helped bring about a temporary halt to domestic hostilities. Internationally, allies were catalysed into joining forces against a common enemy, but the allies and the Chinese were fighting a losing battle against the well-prepared Japanese. Month by month, more and more of China fell to the invaders.

  Seven centuries earlier, as the Mongols advanced south, defeating the Southern Song, they killed 15 million Chinese with unprecedented barbarism and brutality. By the middle of 1945, the Japanese had killed an estimated 14 million Chinese in battle, by torture and through mass genocide. The dropping of atom bombs on Japan brought a rapid end to the Sino-Japanese War in China and World War II in Asia.

  Part two of the Chinese Civil War began forthwith, and by mid-1949 most of Chiang’s Republic of China had fallen under Communist control, prompting him to seek refuge on the island of Taiwan. Mao Zedong entered Beijing in late September and prepared for a ceremony at the city’s heart.

  Although fighting from the summit of the Great Wall in 1933 did little to deflect the Japanese advance, the participation of the reactivated fortifications was widely seen and always remembered as China’s determined stance, its resistance. Thereafter, the Chinese drew spiritual inspiration from it, and continued to occupy the moral high ground as brave defenders, looking down on barbaric belligerents.

  Sixteen years after the brief Defence of the Great Wall Campaign, the indomitable spirit of the ancient Wall was enshrined in the lyrics of a new national anthem. As Mao stood upon the rostrum of the Gate of Heavenly Peace on 1 October, ‘March of the Volunteers’ was sung to open the victory ceremony:

  Arise, we who refuse to be slaves

  With our very flesh and blood

  Let us build our new Great Wall . . .

  48.

  Prop Art

  1960s poster of peace and friendship

  Years before Mao Zedong chose the PRC’s new national anthem, with its self-sacrificial pledge by the people, he had recognised and used the Wall’s innate power to inspire. During his leadership of the Long March, the cat-and-mouse pursuit campaign between the Nationalists and Communists that ranged across the breadth and length of China from south-east to north-west from late 1934 to 1935, he wrote the poem ‘Liupanshan’ (‘Mount Liupan’). In demanding an extra effort from his men to carry on he wrote one of his most famous poetic lines: ‘Bu dao Changcheng fei haohan,’ or ‘Who are we if we cannot reach the Great Wall?’

  The spur worked. The Long Marchers continued, established their new base area just south of the legendary Wall, and fourteen years later had won the right to rule China. In doing so the Communists became only the second Han regime since the tenth century to rule a China that was free of both northern nomadic polities and foreign enclaves (t
he first was the Ming). Unlike the Manchu Qing, who physically and politically abandoned the Wall they inherited, branding it a useless defence and a barrier to ethnic harmony, the People’s Republic rebuilt parts of it – not as a defence but as a national monument.

  As the new Communist government readied itself to lead an old country down a new road, its leadership was conscious of the need to establish its legitimacy. Claiming links with the imperial past was dangerous, but the Great Wall, having been built by the masses, made it more acceptable. It stood as an example of what the Chinese people could achieve through unity. Propaganda chiefs set about re-creating the Wall’s new role within the state’s internal and external policies: it would be used to promote New China’s national harmony and peaceful international intentions.

  This poster illustrates the Wall’s new lease of life as ambassador for peace. A quarter of a million copies were printed in 1960, and would reach approximately 600 million Chinese, ninety-six per cent of them Han, and the remainder ethnic minorities. Seven characters in red along the top of the poster – its title – are small; only twenty-five per cent of people at the time could read, so the text was not the primary focus. Youyi Changcheng, or ‘The Friendship of the Great Wall’, it pronounces, is Wanli Chang, ‘Endless’.

  Because so few could read this, the poster’s message is carried primarily by the image. In the foreground it shows an ethnically diverse group, the multinational Chinese family; in the background the Chinese host visiting foreign friends. The montaged scene presents the ideal of New China’s geopolitical relations during its first decade.