Walking the Wall

With all of the fuss we’ve been making over Chinese New Year the past few weeks, some of you might be wondering what actually happened to walking the wall. You’ll be relieved to know that despite appearances, we do still spend most of our days trundling along the old pile of mud.

You call that trundling?

We spent much of January and February crossing the Ordos, a massive region of loess and desert enclosed by the great loop of the Yellow River. Though the wall in this region is more or less continuous for a few hundred kilometres east of Yinchuan, it is not the most inspiring section, consisting mostly of badly deteriorated rammed earth crossing severely degraded desert and semi-desert. But while this bit of wall may not be as flashy as the brick wall to the northeast or as scenic as the desolate Gobi desert sections to the west, it is central to the history of the Ming Great Wall.

Swiss-cheese wall near Yanchi

For hundreds of years prior to the Ming Wall’s construction, the Ordos was strategically important because of a few simple geographical facts. The Yellow River’s long detour to the north meant that irrigated agriculture was possible only a short distance from the Mongolian heartland. Further within the Yellow River loop, there were extensive grazing lands only a short distance from the Chinese heartland. And the lack of large mountains or other insurmountable barriers south of the Ordos meant that Xian and important Chinese centres along the lower Yellow River could be reached in a few days’ ride from Mongolia.

Controlling the Ordos region, then, was vital to both the Chinese and their nomadic enemies to the north, because the Ordos offered something each of them lacked – in the case of the Mongolians, easy access to the agricultural and small industrial products needed to supplement their pastoral economy; in the case of the Chinese, access to extensive pastures that could support the huge numbers of cavalry needed to defend against the nomads.

Less than 100 years after the Ming drove the Mongolian Yuan dynasty – descendants of Genghis Khan – from China (in 1368), the Mongols once again overran the Ordos and threatened the cities along the lower Yellow River. Factions at the Ming imperial court debated what to do for several years, with some advocating a massive offensive to retake the region and others advocating defensive measures, i.e. wall-building.

The wall in the hills above Anbian, Shaanxi province

In the end, the wall-builders got their way, and in 1474 over 900 kilometres of wall were built under the supervision of General Yu Zijun across present-day eastern Ningxia and northern Shaanxi. According to one history,

[Yu] dug banks, built walls and sank moats in a continuous line over more than 1,770 li from Qingshuiying in the east, to Huamachi in the west. Every two or three li he built towers and ridges to accommodate a warning system, and shorter walls against empty ridges, forming basket-shaped enclosures to shelter lookouts from arrow-fire.*

This massive building project was the first large-scale construction of the Ming Great Wall and it set the pattern for the sections to follow.

Zhenbeitai, just north of Yulin, is said to be the largest single tower on the Great Wall

The complexity and importance of the Ordos wall were reflected in the variety of ruins we saw as we made our way through Shaanxi. By and large the remnants of wall were in worse shape than what we’d seen to date, but they were also more elaborate. There were beacon towers everywhere, often no more than 200 metres apart. Forts were relatively common in Shaanxi as compared to Gansu and Ningxia, and they were much larger.

There are long stretches of double wall across the Ordos

A small fort at sunset

A well-preserved stretch

And finally, after well over 1000 kilometres, we caught our first glimpse of something other than rammed earth or stone wall. In the section of wall between the cities of Jingbian and Yulin, many beacon towers were still partially clad in massive cut stonework and kiln-fired brick, and from the ruins below these towers, it is evident that at least parts of the Shaanxi wall once were as well.

A beautiful beacon tower of cut stone south of Hengshan

Emma looking down from the first brick-clad beacon tower of the trip

*From The History of the Ming, quoted in Julia Lovell, The Great Wall: China against the World, 1000 BC – AD 2000 (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), p. 206. The historical information in this post is taken from Lovell and from Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1990).