The Great Wall: The Extraordinary Story of China's Wonder of the World - Hardcover

Man, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0306817675 ISBN 13: 9780306817670

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2008

Synopsis

The Great Wall of China is a wonder of the world. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists take the five-mile journey from Beijing to climb its battlements. While myriad photographs have made this extraordinary landmark familiar to millions more, its story remains mysterious and steeped in myth. In this riveting account, John Man travels the entire length of the Great Wall and across two millennia to find the truth behind the legends. Along the way, he delves into the remarkable and complex history of China—from the country's tribal past, through the war with the Mongols, right up to the modern day when the Great Wall is once more a commanding emblem of China, the resurgent superpower.

About this title

About the Author

John Man is a historian and travel writer with a special interest in China and Mongolia. His several acclaimed books include Genghis Khan. He lives in the United Kingdom.

Reviews

According to Man, in his second book this year after Terra Cotta Army, China's Great Wall is really a series of walls, part stone, part rammed earth, that were built in different eras and do not form a continuous line. Traveling the wall end to end from Mongolia to Lanzhou, the capital of China's Gansu province, Man learns that the first Great Wall sprang from the towering ambition and brutal policies of the first emperor, Zheng, who around 214 B.C. repaired and joined up a collection of little walls totaling 2,500 kilometers in length. In 1138, China's Jin rulers built 4,000 kilometers of wall, but the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan, burst through the wall in the 13th century and stayed for 150 years. To ensure that they never returned, the 15th-century Ming Dynasty built its wall. Mao co-opted the wall, which no longer served any defense purpose, as a symbolic monument to the achievement of ordinary, suffering people. This engrossing and well-researched history of China's most famous architectural project whets the reader's appetite to tread in Man's footsteps. Photos, maps. (Sept.)
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As he traverses the Middle Kingdom’s most famous landmark, Man discovers complexities lurking behind beliefs that have long defined the Great Wall in popular imagination. It is, for instance, slack mythology that credits China’s first emperor with building the wall to protect his people from barbarian invaders. In truth, Man discovers that the wall long served chiefly to consolidate the internal political power of China’s ambitious rulers. Man even discredits the widespread belief that China built the wall as one unified structure. As he chronicles his own restless travels along a wild patchwork of many different walls, he probes a labyrinth of historical enigmas. Emperors give way to bandits, poets to commissars, as unpredictably as reed and earth supplant rock and brick. The wall’s architectural complexities thus become a huge metaphor for cultural evolution, as the serpentine partition links China’s buried past with its hoped-for future. Deploying the same lively style that attracted readers to his Genghis Kahn (2004), Man transforms a forbidding barrier into an inviting passageway into Asian culture. --Bryce Christensen

Edition details

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0306817675
• ISBN 13: 9780306817670
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352