Great Walls of China

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.

--Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”


Recently, I returned from my second excursion to Beijing. After my first visit in late October, I had a conversation on the bus to Wenzheng College with a Chinese teacher, and this exchange ensured that I would have to go back to the capital during my time in China. “Did you visit the Great Wall?” my colleague asked. He looked at me with profound disappointment as I explained that the weather had been so foggy all weekend that it would have made little sense to take the relatively long trek north of Beijing to the wall. “Well,” he said after a long pause, “you are not a real man until you have been to the Great Wall.”

Today, I can report with pride that, as I approach my fortieth birthday, I’ve became a real man at last, at least by the Chinese measure. I have climbed the long ascent at Mutianyu to the crest of the wall and walked for hours on stones that weave through the mountains like a twisted spine. In winter, tourists are sparse, and once one passes through the stands of dispirited souls selling trinkets without luck at the base of the hill, it’s actually possible to take a contemplative walk on top of the wall. As I walked, I pondered what I’d read about the wall before coming to Beijing. Somewhere between two and three million men died during the long history of the wall’s construction. Surely, the impressed laborers who built the wall felt no investment in the project, but many gave their lives for it nevertheless. At its peak of military use during the Ming dynasty, more than a million men were garrisoned along the wall’s 4000 miles of stone. Was I walking in the footsteps of such masons and soldiers?

The short—and literal—answer is, no. There is, in fact, no Great Wall in the singular. Instead, it would be more accurate to speak of great walls. The first incarnations of the Great Wall were not even erected in the same place where I stood in the winter sun. The wall constructed in the 3rd century B.C.E. under the Qin dynasty was farther to the north, and little of it now remains—an immense effort of men swallowed into the earth, as if it had never been. Thus, when people speak of the Great Wall being more than 2000 years old, the claim is in dire need of qualification—and nearly as much of a myth as the assertion that the wall can be seen from the moon. The Great Wall that draws crowds of visitors today was not built until the 15th century during the Ming dynasty. Yet even here, when we walk along the wall at places like Badaling and Mutianyu, we trod on a reconstruction built not to keep the northern invaders out but to draw the tourists in. We may not like to be reminded by the trinket hawkers that we are mere consumers of a packaged past, but that is the true state of things. Even if we don’t buy the t-shirts and postcards they’re selling, our ticket to the Great Wall purchases an illusion.

Be that as it may, the Great Wall is a glorious illusion. Of all the places I have traveled, only Machu Picchu in Peru surpasses the wall’s fusion of natural and man-made splendor. A large part of the wonder of the wall is that human beings could have managed to build anything at all given the rugged terrain, yet the Chinese had the audacity to construct a stone partition across the county’s vast northern border. The wall rises and falls innumerable times, conquering the topography in Taoist fashion by yielding to it. Yet the wall, like the Eiffel Tower in France, has become a beloved national icon only in retrospect. With regard to its original purpose, it was a dismal failure. The old wall didn’t prevent the Mongols from storming south and conquering China in the 13th century, nor did the Ming wall fare better in staving off the Manchus in the 17th century. Consequently, in historical terms, the wall is a monument to futility more than anything else. How then, did the wall become an enduring symbol of China?

Perhaps the answer lies in the tension between China’s view of itself and its attitude toward the rest of the world. The Chinese word for China, Zhongguo, literally translates as “middle country,” and China has a longstanding cultural tendency to see itself at the center of the universe. There is nothing unusual in this, for anthropologists have noted the presence of such ethnocentrism across cultures. What is unique to China is how long its cultural patterns endured and the extent to which its sense of superiority was well founded. The latter point is best illustrated by what transpired when the Mongols and Machus breeched the Great Wall and conquered China. Both northern invaders reached the same conclusion: there was no better way to govern China than the Chinese way, and the Confucian system of governance that had evolved for well over a millennium continued on despite the dynastic shift into foreign hands. The wall had proved ineffectual in keeping the “barbarians” out but much more successful in sealing in the culture of China. The invaders had triumphed militarily, but, culturally, the positions of victor and vanquished were inverted. To rule China, the Mongols and Manchus strove to become de facto Chinese.

Only in the 19th century did the Chinese confront foes whose sense of cultural superiority rivaled their own, and these invaders came from the east by sea, where the Great Wall offered no resistance. By this time, the medieval wall could not have presented much of an obstacle to the Western powers and their modern weaponry anyhow. The physical wall had become irrelevant, but the Great Wall’s psychological twin persisted much longer. Modern Chinese history is, to a large extent, the story of a great and ancient power coming to terms with modernity and reinventing itself to meet the demands of a changing world. One response to perceived threats from without is to retreat within, to seek refuge behind great walls of the mind. However, a modern nation can hide behind walls for only so long before it begins to suffocate itself.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reformers such Zhang Zhidong sought to encourage both the adaptation of Western technological innovation and the preservation of Confucian values. His was a mission at cross-purposes. The revolution of 1911 that ended the long history of dynastic China and sent the country into decades of social turmoil also made it clear that a nation cannot move backwards and forwards simultaneously. This tumultuous period did not end until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 brought Mao to power and reinforced the psychic wall that ran not just along the northern border but around all of China as well. Mao may have opened diplomatic channels with the US as part of a triangulation strategy against the Soviet Union, but, in doing so, he unwittingly began the process of dismantling the last incarnation of the Great Wall, a wall without stones that has proved to be the most durable wall of them all. Current practices in China such as Internet and other media censorship suggest that the dismantling is far from complete, but, like the old Qin wall, Mao’s psychic wall is nearly in ruins now.

As I walked along the Great Wall, I thought about this complex history and of how, in less than the course of my own lifetime, the very act of a foreigner taking such a stroll on the wall had gone from unthinkable to uncommon to commonplace. In the thirty-odd years since the death of Mao, China has changed from an impoverished and insular country whose isolation rivaled that of North Korea into a vibrant nation with cosmopolitan cities and seemingly limitless potential for economic growth. I don’t think that visiting the Great Wall really did much for my masculinity, but it surely filled me with a sense of awe. The awe stemmed both from a brush against China’s dynastic past as well as the awareness that the China I inhabit today has transformed in ways that almost no one could have imagined, much less have predicted. The Great Wall is now nothing but a tourist stop, and, as I stood on its reconstructed towers and stared out at the scenery, it was as if I could catch a glimpse across the 21st century. There were no real barriers in sight.