An International Collaboration: Creating the Myth of the “Great Wall” 


Why in the world is the Great Wall so great? 

Orbis terrarum–Latin for “wheel of the world”–was the theory of the world to which most Europeans subscribed prior to Christopher Columbus’s journey to the Americas in 1492 CE. Whereas Europeans had considered themselves to be on the periphery of world affairs (i.e. at the bottom of the “wheel”) prior to the 16th-century, the “discovery” of the New World shifted Europe into the center of the map and thus further galvanized its peoples’ subsequent expansion of power to all four corners of the globe. In the east, the Chinese too once believed themselves to be at the center of the world–tian xia (天下)–and they also sought to extend their power outward. Many Chinese emperors’ expansionary policies expanded their territory, but such policies also created enemies from whom that same territory had to be protected. One tangible example by which Qin and Ming emperors, in particular, sought to defend themselves was through the creation of a series of walls, a system built and rebuilt over many centuries, beginning in the 3rd-century BCE under the rule of the Qin Shi Huang emperor (r. 221-206 BCE). Today, the predominantly Ming-era system of walls is referred to as the “Great Wall”–chang cheng (长城)–but this was not always so. Through an unwitting collaboration between a domineering West and a Chinese people struggling with an identity crisis, the idea of a singular “Great Wall”–one long, ancient structure that, from among other places, was once believed to be “visible from…Mars”–evolved relatively recently into a symbol of the Chinese nation that it is today.[1] 
 
To be sure, definitive perspectives on the wall system existed prior to major European involvement in Chinese affairs. In The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth Arthur Waldron writes, “In both high and popular culture, the story of Qin Shi Huang was told and retold…[T]he message was usually the same: the Wall was the work of a tyrant, and it had no military utility. Only rarely in the corpus of traditional literature about…the border fortifications does one find anything positive.”[2] Folklore based on the construction of the pre-Ming walls survives to this day. Preeminent among the stories is that of Meng Jiangnü, a tale whose meaning has changed from an inspiring example of a devoted wife who grieves over her husband’s death at the hand of a despotic ruler to a dastardly criticism of the First Emperor, and by a 1960s-era interpretation, the communist leader Mao Zedong.[3] The shift in the meaning of this story is demonstrative of the shift in meaning of the Great Wall itself; whereas many Chinese once saw it as a mass grave for the victims of tyranny, many contemporary Chinese now view it as a symbol of a great national achievement. It was the latter ideal, inspired largely from the outside and by Europeans, which was appropriated by many 20th-century Chinese. 
 
The earliest European perceptions of the Wall were founded on extremely cursory observations made by Christian missionaries. The Jesuits, in particular, worked in China, and in 1559 Gaspar da Cruz made his observations of the Ming wall system: he “reported ‘a Wall of an hundred leagues in length. And some will affirme it to be more than a hundred leagues.’”[4] The empirical observations of such Jesuits as Martino Martini (1614-61) were highly generalized and based on observations of atypical sections of the disjointed barrier. Furthermore, they avoided describing it in blatantly extraordinary terms. As Europeans continued to spread their reach and to seek the exotic, however, their descriptions of the Wall became far less modest, and they increasingly tended to sensationalize this “magic vision…a work of a people of overgrown children led by despots,” as the 19th-century Frenchman Ludovic Hébert opined.[5] 
 
The objectification of China as an ancient yet inferior land–a perception along the lines of Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism”–gained popularity in Europe during the 18th-century. This followed over a century of self-serving praise of China by Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire who sought to use China’s example (and its Wall) to illustrate the ability of a country to function well and to prosper without the presence of an organized religious establishment. The increasingly romanticized descriptions of a single Great Wall were visualized in precedent-setting illustrations drawn by a member of the Englishman Lord Macartney’s mission to China in 1793-94. Lieutenant Henry William Parish drew pictures of one wall “snaking over the hills,” along with many other sketches of Wall cross-sections and elevations. Macartney’s own assessment from that mission is telling in that he cites the Wall as a symbol of ancient Chinese “foresight” against invasion and as an embodiment of their “regard for posterity.” [6] The admirable and somewhat otherworldly ways in which Europeans regarded the Great Wall and the slow but steady transmission of those perceptions into China notwithstanding, most Chinese viewed it with “perfect indifference” until the political turmoil of the late-Qing era.[7] 
 
As the 19th-century progressed, the Manchus’ mandate to rule China grew exceedingly precarious due to political and social pressures (European colonial ambitions, for example) that their government was unable to alleviate. Contemporary Chinese literati searched their imaginations in earnest for something other than the perpetual rule of a heavenly-endowed emperor to sustain their ideal of an age-old culture. When the Qing were deposed in 1912 the search gained new urgency: whereas emperors had been relatively tangible representations of the bond between Heaven and Earth, traditional imperial power had forevermore been usurped, and something substantial had to take its place in the arena of symbolic importance. 
 
Sensing this void among the Chinese people, the “Father of Modern China,” Sun Yat-sen, wrote about the Wall in Sun Wen xue shuo. Dismissing his contemporary countrymen’s evidence to the contrary, Sun describes a single Wall as a feat of engineering and as the reason that, Waldron explains, “Chinese civilization was able to develop in peace until it was strong enough to assimilate…[barbarian conquerors],” distinctly echoing the interpretations of Macartney and, perhaps, Sun’s own Western teachers. “The transmutation of the Great Wall into a positive and national symbol, which Sun Yat-Sen quite innocently began, was at root a response to [the downfall of the Qing],” writes Waldron.[8] In an era of political turmoil in China, Sun popularized the myth of the Great Wall among his own brethren and set the groundwork for its eventual new place in Chinese vernacular culture. 
 
Reinforced from without, the way in which many Chinese came to regard the Great Wall dramatically changed from a sentiment of disdain to one of national pride, but this did not happen all at once. Assuredly, the ascent to power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) played somewhat of a contradictory role in the popular transformation that Sun had initiated relatively recently beforehand. Although the new communist government began to rebuild certain damaged sections of the Wall in 1952, its membership viewed the Wall as an “imperfect symbol for the ‘New China’” as they sought to create new symbols for their new socialist society.[9] As the ideology of Mao and the CCP gained popularity, however, mass movements against anything pre-communist, anti-communist or anti-Mao literally targeted the Wall. The anti-rightest campaign of 1957 and the Great Leap Forward (1958-60) took proactive steps against any positive or appreciative conception of the Wall. Furthermore, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-69) heavy machinery was employed to dismantle sections of wall, both for the practical utility of the component materials and as response against “rightest” forces and symbols of which the Wall was perceived to represent.[10] 
 
To be sure, all of the aforementioned movements were products of a cult of personality and an ideological fervor that would not last, and the Wall was largely left intact. As the People’s Republic matured, the government found a use for the mythical perceptions of the Wall as they sought to legitimize their own rule at home and abroad.[11] “Five Thousand Years of Chinese Culture” is a slogan used in CCP propaganda today, and the party may have found no better standing example of a link to those past five millennia of supposedly unbroken cultural cohesion than the Wall.[12] Furthermore, since Mao’s death, the image of the Great Wall has become ubiquitous, being positively featured in, among other things, countless stage productions, souvenirs and paintings.[13] Thus the Great Wall not only possibly lends credence to the CCP’s rule domestically and abroad, but it also fills a role in today’s Chinese popular culture and tourist trade. 
 
In the present-day, it appears that whether or not the Great Wall is a continuous construction begun over two thousand years ago is immaterial. The myth of one long wall, visible from space, with a length varying from 1,684 miles (Time magazine’s estimate in 1972) to 31,250 miles (the New China News Agency’s claim in 1979) has inexorably permeated not only the minds of Westerners–its original advocates–but also the minds of many Chinese.[14] Whereas older popular conceptions of the Great Wall envisioned widows visiting the Wall to weep, parts of the barrier are now featured on postage stamps and on t-shirts for tourists. The romanticized perspective of the colonial-era Europeans filled the minds of many Chinese at a time when their self-identity was uncertain and their entire cultural hierarchy was under siege. But just as Europeans set the precedent for the relatively new perspective by which most Chinese now regard the Great Wall, the latter managed to appropriate the myth to assist themselves in reaching their goals of not only securing worldwide legitimacy and clout, but also achieving cultural and national cohesion. In reaching those goals the Chinese have largely been successful, and, along with the help of the fantastic imagination of the West, have affirmed to the world a symbol of a mythically magnificent China that will endure. 

 
[1] Waldron, Arthur. The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. p. 214.
[2] ibid, 203.
[3] ibid, 219.
[4] ibid, 204.
[5] ibid, 209.
[6] ibid, 209.
[7] ibid, 214.
[8] ibid, 215.
[9] ibid, 217.
[10] ibid, 218.
[11] ibid, 222.
[12] ibid. This argument is under-documented, therefore it remains uncertain whether or not the Wall was explicitly chosen by the CCP for this purpose. In any case, it has proven useful to them.
[13] ibid, 220.
[14] ibid, 5.


Thanks to Ashley A Moore for her help with this essay. 

Posted: Sat - November 5, 2005 at 02:17 AM          

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