Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  As I neared the Wall, I pondered how its watchful towers, each dotted with eye-like windows, had seen the arrival of the years 1600, 1700, 1800 and 1900, and what each had brought with it. I wondered what they might witness post-2000. More tragedies, I feared, and I felt pretty helpless – until I remembered my old Wall photographs.

  DESCRIPTION: A ‘then and now’ pair of Great Wall photographs of the same location, east of Luowenyu, taken by Dr William Geil and William Lindesay in 1908 and 1987, respectively

  SIGNIFICANCE: Images that inspired a project to revisit the Wall and show how much it had changed, using the technique of ‘rephotography’

  ORIGIN: Luowenyu, Hebei, 1908 and 1987

  LOCATION: Author’s collection, Beijing

  Since receiving William Geil’s book, I’d collected others containing Great Wall photos, as well as single prints from various sources around the world. I had more than 400 vintage Great Wall photographs in my collection, which I believed might be the largest such archive held by anyone, or any institution. Inspired by that millennium moment, I decided how to use ‘rephotography’ as a tool of Great Wall advocacy and protection.

  It’s said that a good photograph is worth a thousand words; two photographs of the same place, with a time lag in between, will therefore say a lot more. They will strike up a conversation between the past and the present – with a message for the future. This is the technique known as rephotography. It arouses interest, stirs debate and is a means of protest.

  Both Geil and I had made historic journeys of our own along the Wall. Each was a first in its own way, each in a different era. Now we prepared to return there. Our aim: to put together a visual state of the Wall report. We would travel in the past and the present, creating a dual view of the Wall. The physical adjacency of past and present would, we hoped, pose a question mark in viewers’ minds about the future of the location, and of the Wall as a whole.

  From 2003 to 2009 we covered more than 100 sites, documenting the century-spanning changes, including a joint visit back to where it all began: Luowenyu. This time, we asked ‘how’ it came about that what I insisted should be known as Geil’s Tower had fallen. From afar, I had theorised that Luowenyu villagers may have helped themselves to the tower’s bricks, but our site visit suggested otherwise. We saw that another tower, just out of our 1908 and 1987 photographs, stood strongly, making the demolition of a tower further away from the village (the place where bricks were reused) seem illogical.

  Locals sometimes provided answers as to when and why certain negative changes had occurred, but in many instances such awkward questions remained unanswered. It seemed that most people adopted a c’est la vie attitude even when it came to the Great Wall, or they just never thought about it. Individuals pointed to the masses, blaming them. As for Geil’s Tower, then? One possible cause of its downfall may have been the fighting between Chinese and Japanese forces that took place here in 1933 (see Object 47). Another very plausible explanation was the random destruction caused by the powerful Tangshan earthquake of July 1976, whose epicentre was just seventy-five kilometres away. Had Geil’s Tower not fallen, the difference between the two photos would not have been striking at all. I think it’s true to say that Geil and I met there for a variety of reasons: through an act of God, destiny, historical arrangement and generosity.

  This fiftieth object – our final one – is different from all the rest. The two photos are not especially rare: each book had a print run in the thousands. The pictures have minimal monetary value, but as resources they possess the power to influence the future. How? This pair of Luowenyu photographs, and the other ‘then’ and ‘now’ collaborative works that Geil and I created, have inspired some others who have seen them to go out and rephotograph things they care about, things they want their children and their grandchildren to see. Using improving devices and technologies, they are circulating their photos more widely than William Geil ever could. More people than ever before are participating in the protest against the disappearance of our history, of China’s Great Wall.

  It’s a little more than ten years since I first revisited the Wall with William Geil. He used film cameras, as did I – in the main, at least. By the time our project of rephotography concluded, in 2008, we’d entered the digital age. Now, smartphones have empowered us even more. We generate mountains of data daily, including multitudes of images which we share on social networks. If harnessed, this speed and resource might well usher in a new age of protection for our great world monuments.

  The Wall was built by unknown masses and manned by their descendants, and although much of it has now gone, what remains would still require an army to monitor it. But a motivated public might be mobilised to provide true guardianship. The technology they carry permits the anonymous masses to police the destructive actions of individuals, providing authorities with the evidence to bring them to book, and leaving them with no excuses. Only publicity and prosecution will reduce the frequency of damage.

  William Geil’s illustrated Great Wall book was a gift for China. The time is now right for a new gift: a full-length image of every remaining section of every dynastic Wall, in real-time, with 360-degree vision. It would be a new ‘map’ of the Great Wall, rich in cartographic details added by crowdsourcing. People will become the new army protecting the Wall, and social media will be their ‘wolf smoke’, sounding the alert whenever dangers approach.

  I began this series of fifty Great Wall objects by exploring the Ortelius map of China, published in a sixteenth-century atlas. It made the Great Wall the most famous building in the world, albeit the least known. Now, fifty objects wiser, I conclude with an expression of hope, a wish for a ground-breaking new object existing in cyberspace, at everyone’s fingertips. It will rebuild the Great Wall, remaking it as the most famous and the best appreciated of all the world’s wonders.

  Epilogue

  ‘Get back to us for further details when needed.’ That is what various objects had said to me during my Great Wall studies. When the time was right, I took up the offer, contacted them and set off, aiming to detail a story of the Wall from its foundations, to its apogee, to its fall into ruins and then to its rediscovery. My target was a nice neat fifty, but just as a plan to bake a dozen always seems to make thirteen, they grew. This epilogue is several things – part nostalgia, part overview, part behind the scenes, part postscript. It’s also a fitting way to include the best of the leftovers: a ‘lost and found’ map that, in the end, could not be wasted. Its presence here confirms the star quality of the maps throughout the series.

  Starting with a map is a tradition of mine. A standard-issue Oxford School Atlas featuring the Great Wall set me off on a journey – at first in mind and eventually on foot. I chose another atlas map of China to embark on this stage of my ongoing journey, although there was nothing standard about its issue. It was the first world atlas, the first internationally distributed atlas and the most expensive ‘retailed’book of the sixteenth century. Ortelius’Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or ‘Theatre of the World’, gave European viewers their first glimpse of ‘a wall of 400 leagues’ – an experience that I had the privilege of experiencing with the atlas on my study table. This is not the kind of book, of course, that one borrows from the local library: a Beijing-based Dutch friend, Maarten Buitelaar, an avid collector of China maps, had acquired a magnificent 1587 edition, and he generously lent it to me.

  As I time-travelled over Europe and across Asia towards our destination, slowly turning the book’s thick, rippled pages, I imagined what questions might have arisen in the mind of the atlas’ first owner on reaching folio 169, Chinae, and seeing the Wall. His curiosity must have been uncontainable! Sadly, the likelihood of him learning much else about the Wall was slim. But for us it was the first of nine maps among fifty more objects, some of which are still making, or concealing, history.

  The Huayi Tu, or ‘Map of China and the Barbarian Lands’ (Object 13), drawn circa AD 801, was copied onto a stone
in 1135. For some reason, however, nobody in modern times appears ever to have seen the stone version. Scholars have been content to study rubbings of it, and, in their traditional way, have kicked back and forth what others had previously written about the map, perhaps adding their own spin. I approached the Huayi Tu by focusing on the significance of its belated inclusion of a symbol representing a 900-year-old Great Wall; I pronounced it to be the oldest extant image of a Great Wall. I had been intrigued by the map ever since I saw a rubbing of it at the National Library of China, Beijing. But the root object was the inscribed stone itself, and I wanted to see it.

  I went to Beilin, or the Forest of Steles Museum, in Xi’an, to look for the ‘stone map’. A forest is an apt metaphor for this museum: its pavilions and courtyards are crowded with more than 3000 tall, dark stones, standing in groves, inscribed with the periodic history of China. Courtyard by courtyard, I roamed the forest in search of what many geographers and historians had dubbed the earliest extant map of China. After much wandering around, though, I had failed to locate it. For such a supposedly important stone, its absence seemed conspicuous.

  Lost in the forest, as it were, my next move was to request help at the curator’s office through a very good connection, a university classmate who had also studied history at one of Xi’an’s universities. ‘It should be no problem,’ was the optimistic response from the curator. ‘Leave it with me for a day or two,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask my team to look into it.’

  A few days later came a most unexpected and frank answer: ‘Nobody – no Chinese, and certainly no foreigner – is allowed to see that stone. It presents political problems.’

  That was the end of that. But in seeking the object, I had at least discovered that, for some reason, the stone could not be seen. Its confinement – perhaps even its destruction? – turned out to hold an important lesson in political geography.

  Huayi Tu – literally, the ‘China–Barbarians Map’ – has traditionally been regarded as a ‘map of China’ and thus vaunted as a ‘national map’. Its original ninth-century AD perception was straightforward and apolitical. From the time of the map’s creation until the end of the Ming in the mid-seventeenth century, the size and basic shape of ‘China’ had changed only marginally. It had expanded slightly, around what we may regard as a core region, while making some periodic westward extensions, notably during the Han and Tang.

  By the Qing, however, the respected Huayi Tu had become seriously out of date. There were two main reasons. First, the area it showed as being China was now much larger, and second, the people of that land were not only Han but of many ethnic groups which historically had been described as ‘barbarian’. Manchu expansion in all directions beyond the traditional Han heartland of China had seen the largest ever ‘New China’ extended to incorporate Tibet, Turkestan, ‘Outer’ Mongolia and Taiwan, a territorial zenith of 14.7 million square kilometres. The New China also redefined the meaning of ‘Chinese’ people via its zhongwai yijia ethnic philosophy of unity: ‘inside and outside united as one family’.

  After 1911, the successors of the Qing Empire founded the modern Chinese state: first the Republic (1911–1949), which was followed by today’s People’s Republic of China. Naturally, the land they inherited – what the Qing had redefined as ‘China’ – formed the territorial basis of these republics, the main exception being ‘Outer Mongolia’, which had made a bid for independence.

  All this brings us to the Huayi Tu’s ‘political problem’. To accommodate even today’s China, which has been scaled back to less than 10 million square kilometres, the Huayi Tu is too geographically small, too politically incorrect and too ethnically embarrassing. China’s own view is of a unified land, territorially, politically and ethnically. To most observers, it’s a case of one country and two eras, with 1200 years of differences. To some Chinese, it’s a political problem they’d prefer to avoid. Even the image of the Huayi Tu that I provided to illustrate my story in National Geographic was cropped to remove any possible grounds for conjecture.

  While the Huayi Tu stone remains a political prisoner because it shows China as it was in the Tang, one of the maps based on the imperially commissioned survey of 1708–1718 by the French Jesuits (see Object 42), which boasted an unprecedented level of detail and accuracy, was coincidentally making headlines just as I was researching and writing about its Great Wall significance.

  This event occurred when President Xi Jinping of China visited Germany in March 2014. Chancellor Angela Merkel presented him with a copy of a 1735 ‘China’ map that was based on the Jesuits’ endeavours. Although the Manchu rulers of the Qing, particularly Kangxi, had increased the area under their rule, such that they had the largest territory of any imperial dynasty, European interpretations of the imperial survey by d’Anville, King Louis XIVs geographer, and Du Halde, the French Jesuits’ historian, propagated the notion that Han China was ‘China proper’, while the newly conquered, assimilated or annexed dominions on its peripheries formed ‘Greater China’. Since the PRC teaches a seamless view of its geography, and works hard to promote its own modern version of the Qing’s ethnic unity, Merkel’s presentation caused much chagrin among the delegation, and much annoyance among Chinese netizens. The action was seen either as diplomatic clumsiness or as foreign interference in China’s political geography.

  These map episodes effectively highlight one of the great advantages of objects – beyond their pleasing tangibility, demonstrative value and aesthetic qualities. ‘History’ is, strictly speaking, a written account of past events, while ‘solid sources’ of various kinds, whether unearthed archeologically or collected and handed down, offer us material or visual evidence.

  Writing can be changed more readily – by altering or obliterating text, by ripping out pages, by issuing a new edition. Solid objects, although they are no more than a snapshot of a past event, can sometimes preserve an authentic picture of what has been forgotten, or of what people want to forget. Imagine if the Huayi Tu had never been copied onto a stone in 1135. Only the transferral of the map onto a stone block preserved it for us today. I hope it survived the iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution’s fanatics, but we will only know when the powers that be decide that it’s time to release it from captivity, and let it be seen for what it is: a national treasure of China’s historical geography, and the earliest known image of the Great Wall.

  The only genre of objects outnumbering maps in this book is weapons, of which there are ten. This isn’t surprising; it reiterates that the Great Wall existed in a theatre of conflict. But the appearance of what stand as milestones in the history of global weapons development speaks loudly about the protraction of the conflict – over 2000 years. The same peoples, from the same sides, fought in the same theatre for largely the same reasons, and they stuck with what they did best: attacking on horses and defending from walls. But the weapons they fought with did change, as more complex technologies promised victory.

  Wood and horn were joined by metal. Bows relying on elasticity and strength and skill were matched, even outmatched, by crossbows with mechanical metal triggers, which required instruction and maintenance. Brute strength was joined by chemical energy with the arrival of ‘hot’ weapons. Mines could even be preset though an ingenious automatic ‘switch’.

  The third group of note contains objects that have an equine connection – again, this is hardly surprising, given that I have précised the story as a conflict of horsemen versus Wall. There are six horsey objects. We have seen the horse as cavalry, as transport, as tribute and more. We have seen the regular reappearance of the horse as a bargaining chip; from the nomads’ side, this never lost its appeal, nor did horses their value by becoming overly plentiful. Why did the nomads keep giving the Chinese horses as tribute, and why at the same time could the Chinese not build a successful breeding program of war horses? Our concluding horse story – on the fascinating mystery of whether it was selenium deficiency or toxicity that was the root cause – is a p
rompt for further research.

  In my interactions with students I always focus on the valuable lessons that the past has for the present. As Winston Churchill said, ‘The further you look into the past, the more able you are to see into the future.’ Ten of the fifty objects contain strong conservation messages. I’ve suggested, for instance, that the little-known version of the Meng Jiangnü legend, in which she discovers her husband’s name inscribed on a brick marking his entombment, should be used in the campaign to prevent the Great Wall from becoming a graffiti Wall.

  The most poignant conservation messages came from my enquiries into ‘wolf smoke’. However wolf smoke had been made originally, the term, preserved within the Chinese language, signalled a grave warning about the destruction of the habitat of the wolves’ main prey, gazelles, whose dwindling numbers now graze on an ever-diminishing core of one of north-east Asia’s major remaining ecosystems, the Great Eastern Steppe. Sourcing a photograph of the Mongolian wolf in the wild proved to be a most difficult task.

  Contacting the majority of these objects took me out of my study in Beijing – my own Great Wall museum, which contains a minority of chosen objects – and led me to museums along the Wall: at Jiayuguan in the west, Shanhaiguan in the east, and Badaling to the north of Beijing. In Mongolia I found fascinating objects, which I was privileged to handle and study at close quarters at the National Museum of Mongolia and the Museum of the Great Hunnu Empire. In the United States I found objects and details in the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery and at Doylestown Historical Society. In my other home, Britain, my research took me back to several familiar institutions: the Royal Geographical Society, the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The most unlikely and difficult hunting ground was at the Vatican Museum.