Category Archives: Chinese History and Legend

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The Great Wall of China: The Original Rabbit-Proof Fence

The Great Wall of China is as synonymous with China as the Tower Bridge is with Great Britain, the Statue of Liberty to the United States or the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Australia. The difference between the Great Wall and all those other things, though, is that the Great Wall came first.

Shrouded in mystery, myth, legend and history, what is the Great Wall, why was it built? How long has it been around and what is it made of? Who built it and to what purpose?

A Note on the Title

For the unknowing and curious readers who have puzzled over the title of this posting, I took inspiration for the title from this famous Australian BigPond Broadband Internet advertisement and the title of the film “The Rabbit-Proof Fence”.

The Purpose of the Great Wall

The Great Wall is not just one structure. It is in fact a series of walls that were built along China’s northern borders, starting in the 5th Century BCE and ending in the 1500s. The walls were built in an attempt to prevent invasions from barbarians, nomadic tribes and Mongolian armies from the north. Several provinces and states in northern China had constructed earthwork and wood defences along their borders as protection against each other as well as for protection against neighbouring countries. In the roughly 200 years before the Birth of Christ, Emperor Qin Shi Huang founded the Qin Dynasty, and so began Chinese Imperial rule, a form of rulership that would continue for centuries, well into the 20th century. In 221 BC, Emperor Shi Huang ordered that all individual state borders and defences be destroyed. It was his desire to unify China as one country and for that one country to defend itself. Building on the ideas of his subjects, Emperor Shi Huang ordered the construction of the first Great Wall.

Very little of that original Great Wall still exsists today. Most of it was destroyed by the elements over the centuries, or was incorporated into additions made to the wall by other emperors during subsequent reigns and dynasties. It’s believed that over a million construction-workers died while building these initial segments of the Great Wall.

Over the next few centuries, Mongolian warriors grew more powerful. The Han and Ming Dynasties added considerably to the wall, due to the increase in attempted invasions by Manchurian armies from the north, starting in the early 1600s. From the start to the end of the Ming Dynasty, nearly 5,000 extra miles of wall was built to combat the threats of invasion from the north.

Building the Great Wall

Because the Great Wall is centuries old, it isn’t actually built out of any one material. Sections of the wall have been built using anything and everything from rubble, specially cut stones, wood, bricks and even rammed earth. The earliest incarnations of the Great Wall were built out of rubble, stones and wood. Rammed earth was also used. It wasn’t until much later that bricks entered the construction site.

Rammed earth construction is what a significant portion of the Great Wall was made of. This is unique construction-technique that has been known since ancient times. Combining ordinary soil, gravel, chalk and other natural materials, the earth is rammed to form the structure it will be building. Rammed earth is packed, pummelled and rammed…hence the name…until it has become extremely compact and dense. This construction method meant that the Great Wall was extremely strong and solid, as well as being impervious to fire…an obvious benefit when constructing a defensive barrier. Rammed earth construction was easy to do, but was extremely labour-intensive, and the Great Wall required millions of labourers to aid in its construction.

It was in later times, around the 16th and 17th centuries, that the Great Wall started taking on the shape that we know it for today, built out of bricks and with wide walkways and watchtowers along its length. Bricks were easier to produce and faster to shape than stones. This readily-available building material meant that the wall could be built faster and stronger.

Of course, for the Great Wall to be built of bricks, it had to have mortar to bind and hold the bricks together. Believe it or not, but the ancient Chinese had already devised a mortar for their bricks. And it wasn’t cement, either. Ancient Chinese mortar was made of rice and eggs! Prepared properly, this simple mixture, which could easily be mistaken for the worker’s lunchbreak snacks, is a substance of surprising strength, and it is still used today in the restoration of ancient Chinese buildings.

The Greatness of the Wall

The Great Wall of China would never be called the Great Wall if there was nothing for it to be great about…would there?

So, what is so great about this wall, anyway?

Including trenches, valleys, rivers and the manmade structure itself, the Great Wall is 8,851km long (5,500mi).
It has over 700 beacon-towers and over 7,000 lookout towers.
Although this obvious varies along its length, the Great Wall is an average of about 20-24ft high.
The wall is 15-30ft wide at the base, and correspondingly, 9-12ft wide at the top. Wide enough for columns of troops, or wagons, to drive along the wall.

The Wall’s name in Chinese is the Wan Li Chang Cheng. “Changcheng” translates into English as “Long fortress” or “Long Wall”. “Wan” is the number ‘10,000’. The word “Li” was a traditional Chinese unit of measurement. In modern measurements, 1Li is 500 meters.

It has long been rumored that the Great Wall is so great that it is actually visible from the moon. This is not true. The colour of the wall’s bricks blends in too easily with the colour of the surrounding earth, making the Wall impossible to see from space, and more than impossible to see from the moon! Testimony from famous astronauts such as Neil Armstrong confirmed the fact that the Great Wall is not actually visible from space at all.

The Great Wall of China ceased being a defensive structure after the 18th century. The Qing or Manchu Dynasty (the last dynasty of Imperial China) was made up of a group of invading Manchus from the north. Their presence in China made the wall’s purpose (keeping out invaders) obsolete and no further additions were made to the wall after this point. The Great Wall was recognised as a significant historical and cultural icon in the second half of the 20th century, and the UNESCO World Heritage Committee made it a World Heritage Site in 1987. Although the ‘touristy’ areas of the Great Wall are renovated, repaired and restored, both for tourist, historic and safety reasons, many sections of the Great Wall, far away from the big cities of northern China, are in disrepair due to natural elements as well as various other factors, such as the wall’s bricks being removed by local villagers for use in construction of homes and roads. Nevertheless, the Great Wall of China remains one of the most famous structures in the world.

 
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The Mid-Autumn Festival

As the Chinese (among other cultures and civilisations) traditionally followed the Lunar Calender, various events on Chinese calenders change to a different date on the more commonly-used Western calender. Chinese months are dictated by the movement of the moon, instead of the sun, as with Western calenders. Before very long, the world (or at least, the Chinese part of it) will be celebrating one of the most famous events on the Chinese calender.

The Moon Festival.

Also called the Mid-Autumn Festival or the “Mooncake” Festival, it was and is, one of the most famous Chinese holidays in the world. But what exactly does this festival celebrate, when does it happen and how is it celebrated?

The Date of the Mid-Autumn Festival

As the event’s title rather obviously suggests, the Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated in the middle of Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. In 2010, this date will be the 22nd of September. A little less than two weeks from now. It was actually the approach of this festival that inspired this article. This blogger having a Chinese background, it’s only natural that he keep an eye on important Chinese celebrations so as to successfully cash-in on any goodies that might come his way. But…what kind of goodies are there?

The Chinese Mooncake

The Chinese Mooncake, called a ‘Yuebing‘ (‘You-Bing’), literally “Moon Biscuit” or “Moon Cake”, is one of the most famous and undeniably, one of the most delicious Chinese desserts ever to come out of the Far East. Mooncakes are small compared to Western cakes, about the size of a Chinese rice-bowl. Mooncakes feature a thin, pastry crust, usually stamped or imprinted with Chinese characters or a pattern of some kind, and a thick, dense, sweet paste-filling, variously made of peanuts, mung-beans, Lotus-seeds, red beans and in Southeast Asia…even Durian paste! Some varities of mooncake feature salted egg-yolks in their centers, to symbolise the moon.


A traditional Chinese mooncake. The yellow stuff in the center is the salted egg-yolk. There are varieties of mooncake which are sold yolkless, however

The Mooncake is considered a delicacy in Chinese cuisine. Apart from tasting like edible heaven, the mooncake is notoriously labour-intensive to make…probably why they’re only made once a year! Although modern manufacturing-processes have made it easier to make mooncakes, they’re still usually only a once-a-year treat if they’re home-made (akin to the Christmas pudding) due to the time it takes to make them.

The History of the Mooncake

The mooncake is believed to have been created in the 14th century during the Yuan Dynasty. Legend states that during this period, China was invaded by the Mongols. To overthrow them and restore traditional Chinese rule, revolutionaries and resistance-leaders baked special cakes with Chinese characters stamped on their tops. As a conventional cake, the characters made no sense. The cake had to be sliced up and the slices then rearranged like a game of Scrabble before the characters, then arranged in their correct order, would reveal their secret message. Using this method, the revolutionaries delivered cakes throughout China, spreading the word about a planned uprising. The uprising was successful and in 1368, the Yuan Dynasty collapsed, to be followed by the Ming Dynasty. The cakes are still made today to commemorate the return of traditional Chinese rule, as well as to celebrate the Mid-Autumn festival and the full moon. An alternate version of the legend was that messages were written on paper (giving the date and time of the planned rebellion). The messages were scrunched up and hidden in the center of mooncakes so that their secret would only be discovered when the cake was sliced up to be served. Neither of these legends is likely to be true, but they sure make for some interesting stories.

The Celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival

The Mid-Autum, Moon or Mooncake Festival is one of the biggest celebrations in the Chinese calender (along with Chinese New Year). Depending on the cycles of the moon, the Mid-Autumn Festival takes place in either September or October each year and celebrates the end of the harvest-season. Traditionally, families gathered together to eat mooncakes, moon-gaze and for the youngsters at least, to play with fire (literally!). Another nickname for the Mid-Autumn Festival is the ‘Lantern Festival’, this is because it was a tradition for children to be given lanterns after the sun went down and when they went outside to play. As a child, I remember the lanterns that we used to have, with candles inside them. The candles shone against the sides of the lanterns (which were shaped as various animals or objects such as flowers or fish) and reflected the plastic, coloured sides of the lantern, shining all kinds of different colours everywhere.


Children holding lanterns during the Mid-Autumn Festival

Other traditional celebrations of the Mid-Autumn festival include dragon-dances and the burning of incense.

 
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The Four Great Chinese Inventions

The Chinese are famous for all kinds of things. Kicking butt, cooking weird and wonderful food (fried grasshopper, sir?) and the One Child Policy. But for centuries, the Chinese have also been famous as a country of inventors, bringing us such wonderful things as pasta, fortune-cookies and mahjong.

Okay I lied. Only one of those inventions are actually Chinese. Pasta was invented in Italy and fortune-cookies were invented in California, USA. Neither of them is actually Chinese. Mahjong, the famous Chinese tabletop game with a reputation for gambling, was invented by a Chinese empress to play with her servants when they were bored, with the distinctive rectangular blocks first being made out of ivory.

But of all the things that the Chinese gave the world, the four most famous and probably, most important ones, are paper, gunpowder, the compass and woodblock printing. These four things are traditionally called the “Four Great Inventions of Ancient China”. In Chinese, they’re called the ‘Si Da Ming‘ (literally “four big inventions”). Without them, the modern world as we know it today, probably wouldn’t exist. How could we have our printers and scanners without paper? Or how would a German guy named Gutenberg have gotten the idea for the moveable-type printing-press if he hadn’t known that the Chinese could print first? How would all our ships and planes and boy-scouts have found their way around without compasses and most importantly, how could we have produced better weapons without the invention of gunpowder?

China’s a massive country. It really is. See if you can find it on a map, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It seemed fairly obvious that with so many people crammed into one tiny place, the Chinese were bound to invent something sooner or later, to improve their hectic lives. Which of the four inventions came first?

Papermaking

Paper. So simple. So wonderful. So versatile. Used to wrap parcels, cover walls, write on, fold intricate cutesy shapes out of and the answer to the prayers of millions of people on the millions of toilets all over the world. What is paper and how did the Chinese invent it?

As any tree-hugger will tell you, paper is made from wood. The first kind of ‘paper’ was called ‘papyrus’ and it was invented in Ancient Egypt. It was made from the reeds of the papyrus tree, which grew near the River Nile. Of course…papyrus trees don’t just grow anywhere, so people needed a better material than papyrus. Vellum (calfskin leather) was excellent quality for writing, but it would be like writing on silk. Very pretty, but damned expensive. The world needed something better. Something easier to make. Something cheaper. Something like…paper.

Enter a guy named Cai Lun (pronounced ‘Chai Lunn’). Cai Lun was a smart guy. He lived from 50-121AD, allowing the Mortal Coil to springboard him up to the Cloudy Place at the ripe old age of 71. He had to be smart to live that long! And he had to be smart to get his job, too! What was his job? Cai Lun was doing very nicely for himself as a courtier to Emperor He, fourth emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty. Of course, being a courtier to the Chinese emperor meant that Cai Lun wasn’t a complete man…ahem. Chinese law dictated that the only men living in the Imperial Household were the Emperor and his male family members. Cai Lun was a eunuch.

Although he had no physical ones to speak of, Cai Lun had a lot of stones. This guy invented paper! Prior to Cai Lun’s existence, most documents were written on bamboo. A bamboo shaft was chopped up and the characters of the text were written on it in vertical shafts and these shafts were then sewn together. Completed, a bamboo-text looked like this:

Although it looks pretty darn cool, can you imagine having an entire bookcase of this stuff? The damn thing would collapse! The Chinese wanted something that was easier to make, faster to make and of course…lighter! Lighter than the huge fagots of text that they were carrying around!…And a fagot is a bundle of sticks, if you’re wondering…go ahead, look it up in the dictionary.

Traditional Chinese paper, as invented by Cai Lun in the year AD105, was made up of…junk. Basically. He used plant-fibres, particularly, the fibres of the mullberry tree (favourite diet of the silkworm) and the fibres that come from hemp, along with other junk, like old rags and fishnets. Ground up, mixed up, pounded out and left to dry on a flat surface, Cai Lun was able to make paper out of all this trash. Of course…these days paper isn’t quite made the same way, but Cai Lun showed us all that it was possible. Over the years, he and others like him, refined the papermaking process until we have what we have today.

Note that I type ‘years’. Not months. Not weeks. Years. Chinese paper, though easy in theory, was notoriously difficult to make. Although the Chinese had mastered the art of papermaking, they were exceedingly adverse to anyone trying to pinch their ideas. Other countries such as Korea, Siam and Japan all tried to copy the Chinese, but without the proper instructions, they failed. One possible reason for this was because Chinese paper was incredibly thin. So thin that it was only possible to write on one side of it. This delicacy added to the difficulty experienced in making it.

It took centuries, but eventually, paper spread around the world, appearing in Europe at the close of the 1300s, where it was being produced in places such as Germany, Spain and Italy.

And so Cai Lun had changed the world. Emperor He was suitably impressed by this…paper…stuff, that he rewarded Cai Lun handsomely, with the usual corporate bonuses of the day – Lots of money, a chunk of land…and an aristocratic title! Fancy, huh? Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Emperor An, the sixth emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty was not happy with all the riches that his uncle, Emperor He, had given Cai Lun, and attempted to arrest him. Cai Lun wasn’t about to be sent to jail, so he had a bath, put on his very best clothes and committed suicide by poison in AD121. Although Cai Lun wasn’t able to live out his natural life, his invention, paper, continues to live on to this day.

Woodblock Printing

Woodblock printing comes along next during the 9th Century (the 800s). It is unclear who invented woodblock printing and likely, no one person was responsible. It was, however, the next logical step. You had paper. Now you needed a printer. And sooner or later…a computer with Windows Vista on it, as well. But for now, mankind needed a printer. Woodblock printing originated in Asia around the mid 800s. It was a tricky and delicate way to print stuff, but it did work. First, you needed a flat slab or board of wood. Then, it was necessary to carve a relief-matrix in the piece of wood. This meant carving out every single little stroke of each Chinese character so that when the block was inked and the paper was pressed, the characters would show up nice and dark and black, and everything else was white. Hard enough to do in English, almost impossible in Chinese! And then don’t forget…you had to do it in reverse, or else the text would come out in mirror-fashion! Unless you were Leonardo from Vinci, they would be completely useless!

Woodblock printing took a lot of skill and time and patience, so whatever it was you wanted to print, you had to be damn sure of, first! Once the matrix had been carved and inked, it was necessary to lay down some of Cai Lun’s beautiful paper, and then press or roll it firmly over the inked matrix. The result looked something like this:

It wouldn’t be another five or six centuries until Gutenberg invented his moveable-type printing-press, but the Chinese had shown us that printing was possible. It was very difficult and expensive, but yes, it could be done.

Gunpowder

Probably everybody’s favourite classical Chinese invention is the stuff that goes ‘Boom!’. Also known as ‘gunpowder’.

Like woodblock printing, Chinese gunpowder (known today as ‘blackpowder’) was invented sometime in the 800s. It is generally believed that Chinese alchemists (an old-fashioned term for a scientist or a chemist) accidently created gunpowder while mucking around in their labs one day. It’s unclear exactly how this happened, but what is known is that the alchemists were trying to make the Elixer of Immortality. Without any philosophers stones, magical mirrors or wise, homosexual wizards around to help them, they were doing it largely by trial and error. And then, they discovered it. The Elixer of Immortality. Or at least, it did grant immortality in the sense that when you detonated enough of this stuff, it released your immortal soul to the heavens. So they did get there in the end.

The ingredients to classical Chinese gunpowder were startlingly simple. Hell, you could probably make it in your kitchen right now. Sooner or later it might show up on MasterChef (“And here’s one we prepared earlier!…”). How simple was Chinese gunpowder? It had only four ingredients! Charcoal (which you can get from your fireplace) potassium-nitrate (‘saltpetre’, which can be extracted from human urine), realgar (a form of sulphur) and…honey.

Mixed in the correct ratios and baked at 200 degrees for two hours…okay I kid…you could make gunpowder. Gunpowder was predictably, very unstable and it didn’t take much to set it off. As one text states, after mixing up those ingredients, the unfortunate alchemists could have burnt…

    “…their hands and faces…and even the whole house where they were working…”

So as you can see, pretty powerful stuff. That excerpt was taken from a 9th century Chinese religious text.

Gunpowder changed the world. With it, mankind could produce all kinds of scary weapons. Pistols, muskets, musketoons, blunderbusses, cannons, artillery-pieces, grenades and fireworks (another awesome Chinese invention). Before the invention of dynamite, gunpowder was also used in construction to blast holes in rocks!

The Compass

The compass is a tricky thing to date. Like the needle that we know it for today, its date of invention swivels and wobbles and spins around like a toddler who just discovered a revolving computer-chair. The first mentions of magnetism in Chinese texts date back to before Christ. The first practical compasses which were used for navigation, however, date from the 11th and 12th centuries, between about 1040-1120.

The traditional Chinese compass was the “ladle and bowl” or “spoon and bowl” style of compass. They looked like this:

Like all great inventors, the Chinese made things to be multifunctional. You could use the compass to find your way to the restaurant and then eat dinner with it at the same time.

Chinese studies with magnetism and its affect on metals (well, iron, really) date back to the 4th century BCE, but the compasses that we know today were born in the 1100s. The Chinese were quick to see the benefits of the compass. With a constant North-Bearing, navigation was now possible. Chinese navigational compasses had the ‘bowl’ part of the compass filled with water, with the lodestone, compass-needle or ‘spoon’ floating on top. With the lubrication of the water, the lodestone could move around freely, giving navigators a clear sense of their direction. It’s partially thanks to the compass that in ancient times, the Chinese had one of the biggest navys in the world! With such a big navy, it was necessary for the Chinese to know where they were going. So a form of the now-famous compass-rose was created. Unlike the modern one (which has 32 points), the Chinese rose had 48 different reference-points! Imperial eunuch and famous Chinese sailor, Zheng He, made frequent mention of compass-bearings during his oceanic travels.

And so there you have it. The four great inventions of Ancient China. And probably the biggest irony is…the title of the Four Great Inventions was a term coined by the ENGLISH…not the Chinese…who found out about it, and decided to pinch it for their own publicity purposes.