2006;
351 pages. Full Title: The Great Wall – China Against the World 1000 BC – AD
2000. New Author? : Yes. Genres : History; China; Non-Fiction. Overall Rating : 8*/10.
The thing about the Great Wall of China is,
it’s so positively great. That’s why the
Chinese call it that.
I still remember the iconic picture of it, when President Nixon was visiting for
a photo op back in 1972. The wall looked like
something you’d see on a medieval castle.
And to think it was actually built 2,000 years ago!
I
can’t imagine how much labor went into the construction – making a single wall
stretching all across northern China. Still,
it was a good investment. It was made to
keep the barbarians out, and with the exception of Genghis Khan, it worked
pretty well.
And it’s huge! Did you know it’s
the only man made object on Earth that can be seen from the moon? Neil Armstrong is on record as having spotted
it while he was traipsing around up there.
Sadly,
most if not all of the above is inaccurate, being hyperbole written mostly by
Western visitors to impress their countrymen back home and, in a lot of cases,
with the idea of spurring trade between China and Europe. We’ll list the correct facts at the end of
this review.
What’s To Like...
The Great Wall
is a clever undertaking by Julia Lovell to tell the history of China by
juxtaposing something the Chinese have been doing for several millennia –
building walls. Trying to squeeze 3,000 years of events into 351 pages of text (plus another 50
pages of Appendices, Notes, a Bibliography, and an Index) is essentially an impossible task, particularly when presenting it to people whose knowledge of Chinese history is limited to
Confucius, the Mongols, and Mao Zedong (the author’s spelling). Surprisingly, Julia Lovell succeeds
admirably.
The
book is divided into 12 chapters, plus an Introduction and a Conclusion, and is
presented in more or less chronological order.
Wherever an opportunity arises, wall-building is spotlighted, even when the walls
were obsolete, and even when the "walls" refer to internet firewalls and those around shopping malls. The maps, notes, and
pictures all work smoothly, and I liked the use of pinyin (minus the tonal
marks, but that’s not a complaint) and lots of examples of classical Chinese poetry.
Unlike
several reviewers, I thought Julia Lovell had a very balanced view of the
various factions. She gives a “warts and
all” view of the various Chinese dynasties, the various nomadic tribes to the
north, and the various more-recent European powers wielding their gunboat diplomacy. The life of Sun
Yat-sen gets fleshed out here, and there’s lots of interesting trivia, such as Mao
Zedong being an enthusiastic but amateur versifier.
My
favorite Chinese poet Li Po gets some ink (although his name is rendered “Li Bo” here), even if he’s
portrayed as a “drunken, duelling, romantic
wanderer who is said to have drowned after leaping, drunk, into a river to
embrace the reflection of the moon.”
Maodun was new to me – I wouldn’t want to mess with
him even if I was his father. I enjoyed
meeting the early Turks, who were a major adversary of Chinese expansionism way
back in the 6th century AD, and I was startled to learn that it was a Tibetan tribe that destroyed the Yan dynasty. I liked that oracle
bones were used for divination for centuries, and that chess was being played in China as early as the
12th century AD.
Since I took two years of Mandarin a few years back, I already knew that there are a bunch of dialects spoken throughout China (including Cantonese in
the south), but that since they all use the same script, everyone in China can understand any and all written
communication by their countrymen. The southern city of Hangzhou get brief mention; it brought back memories from a business trip I took
there 15 years ago. The eight-year-long imperial debate about which of the five “cosmic elements” would
be used by the Jin Dynasty made me chuckle.
An executive committee where I used to work once took eight months and
many meetings to discuss what the company colors would be. Dilbert would have sighed.
The Great Wall is written in English, not
American, but I didn’t find that distracting.
Stylistically, I’d label it a “scholarly” presentation, almost a polar
opposite of the way Sarah Vowell or Mary Roach writes, and very effective here.
Kewlest New Word ...
Corvée (adj.)
: referring to unpaid labor (as towards constructing roads) due from a feudal
vassal to his lord.
Others: panegyrics
(n.); enfeoff
(v.); havering
(v.); poetaster
(n.).
Excerpts...
[Erzhu Rong]
crossed the Yellow River, settled on a hillside outside Luoyang and invited the
capital’s aristocracy for a meeting at his campsite. From there, after gracelessly massacring
every single member – perhaps as many as 3,000 – of this state welcoming party,
and drowning the dowager empress and her child-emperor in the Yellow River, he
rode into Luoyang and set about enjoying court life, until he was himself
stabbed to death in 530 by the new puppet emperor he had installed. Following a plucky but doomed attempt to
defend the city, the emperor was himself garroted by the murdered leader’s
successors, shortly after praying to the Buddha not to let him be reborn as a
king. (loc. 1995)
By his death in
1688 – at which point he was fluent in six languages, including Chinese and
Manchu – Verbiest had laboured for almost two decades on behalf of the imperial
court. He had drawn up calendars, built
huge and elaborate astronomical instruments, as well as an observatory in which
to use them, and overseen the forging of 132 large cannons (on which he
eccentrically inscribed the names of male and female Chinese saints),
subsequently used to arm China’s city walls.
(…)
Perhaps his most
innovative moment was an early attempt at an automobile, in which he strapped a
boiler on to an oven, attached a paddle wheel, gears and wheels, and
steam-motored around the corridors of the Forbidden City for an hour or so. (loc. 4286)
“Who scruples much achieves little.” (Fei Yi) (loc. 814 )
It’s
hard to find anything to nitpick about in The Great
Wall. There were some “gaps” in
the history, such as the history of the southern parts of China, the historic
relation between Tibet and China, the fall of the last dynasty (Qing)
in 1911, and Mao ousting Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. But there’s only so much you can cover in 351
pages, and I doubt any of these topics could be tied in to the “wall-building” motif.
The book was a slow read for me, but I think that’s because I was so unfamiliar with all
those emperors, warlords, dynasties, and barbarian leaders. If there was an underlying theme, it was that
there is always an inherent and eternal tension when any agrarian-based
“civilized” society abuts a roving hunter-gatherer one. Or, as the book puts it, “the Chinese viewed the northern tribes as
raiding barbarians, while the nomads viewed the Chinese as raiding targets.”
8 Stars. Some truths about the Great Wall, courtesy of
Julia Lovell’s book. The
“castle-looking” part of it you see in all the photographs is just north of
Beijing. It looks “medieval” because
that portion was built relatively recently, about 500 years ago, not 2000. It’s still impressive though.
Other sections of the wall are much older, not connected to the picturesque portion, and much more primitive in
construction. It’s only recently that
the Chinese started calling it “the Great Wall”, mostly for tourism
purposes. Historically, they called it
many things, including “the Long Wall”.
The
wall’s purpose is more offensive than defensive. It kinda says “this is a boundary to our land”, just like Israel’s Palestinian wall, the
Berlin wall, and Trump’s Mexico wall.
Yes, it says “keep out” as well, but as Genghis Khan
apocryphally said, “the strength of walls depends on the courage of those
who guard them.”
You cannot see the Great Wall from the moon. Yes, Neil Armstrong thought he did, but it
turns out he was actually observing a cloud formation.
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