Mon, 29 Mar 2010 02:12 GMT+8

There is a joke I once heard about the Great Wall. A young boy asks his father “Dad, why did the Chinese build the Great Wall?” the father hesitates, thinks, then smiles confidently and responds “well, to keep out the rabbits”. It's a good joke and it's also not far from the truth. The “Rabbits” of course were not so much fluffy as fierce-some. The northern nomadic hordes had ravaged much of Northern China a century before the wall was built. They had raped, murdered and scorched farms, ensuring they could not be used to years to come. During the Warring Period 9403 to 221 BC), right after he had unified China, Emperor Qinshihuang realised another invasion of this kind could tear apart the fragile kingdom. He called for a great wall to be built – stretching from the Eastern Bohai Sea to desert in the West.

 

300, 000 men, many of them political prisoners, were put to work on the wall, lugging rocks and mortar up the steep hills. The sheer scale of the project is mind-boggling. Over the next centuries it was rebuilt, fortified and lengthened, particularly during the Ming Dynasty (AD 1368-1644 ). In the end it ran 1500 miles, winding through the mountains, following the course of two great rivers. Was it successful in keeping out invaders? Well, partly. No invading army ever got past the physical wall, but they found ways to circumvent it. During the seventeenth century, the kingdom was lacking funds and under intense internal pressure. Sentries on the Wall, who had not been paid for months, were bribed by the Manchus to let them pass. As a result, the Ming dynasty fell.

 
Richard Nixon once famously said “This is a Great Wall and only a great people with a great past could have a great wall and such a great people with a such a great wall will surely have a great future” and truly we cannot examine the wall separately to the people it protected. China's history is a long and winding as the wall itself, full of pockmarks, ruinous sections, strongholds and beauty. The Great Wall is now a tourist attraction and nothing more, yet unlike many other great structures like the Pyramids in Egypt, the people who built this magnificent structure are still in existence, their culture and traditions still intact. This is what's most fascinating. The wall continues to be repaired in parts but much of it is left to the elements. China will still undergo many changes, challenges and conflicts perhaps but the Great Wall will always remain, to remind us from where we have come.