The wall utilised natural features where possible, running along ridges for extra height; almost half the Qin wall was situated at the top of a slope, with the north side dug away to create a sheer barrier, and drainage facing south to prevent the growth of foliage on the north side. Where the terrain was naturally treacherous, the wall occasionally petered out completely. A fifth of its span contains no ‘wall’ at all, but instead strongpoints and forts blocking the narrow entrances to otherwise impassable valleys.
But where the Great Wall genuinely was a wall, with a ditch dug in front, creating an extra obstacle for any would-be attacker. Its construction was largely of earth rammed layer-upon-layer, following the same building practises as the lesser walls throughout the south, and on a much smaller scale, the basic construction of any rice paddy. However, in places where additional strength was needed, close to rivers or on low floodplains, the wall’s construction materials included rocks and stones. Where soldiers were stationed for a particularly long time, or stronger defences were thought necessary, the construction of the wall involved more stone than earth. Today, such locations are best preserved far from civilisation. Too close to later human habitation, and the stone portions were broken up for building materials by later generations. Additional mounds still extant at intervals along the wall suggest that there were also raised platforms forming watch- or signal towers.
There is much research still to be done on the nature of the wall, particularly since centuries of later additions and improvements have made it difficult to tell where the Qin wall was. Popular modern images of the Great Wall are actually of the Ming wall, built many centuries after the First Emperor’s efforts. Where the Ming wall occupies the same ground as its Qin predecessor, it has usually wiped away all traces of it.
Parts of the Qin wall may not have been completed, but others may have faded away with time. We know that the First Emperor travelled to supervise the construction in his later years, so presumably the first stage of the accompanying road-building was completed. Archaeologists have found the start and end of Meng Tian’s road to the capital, but the middle is lost under the Ordos, presumed eroded along with the wall that may have run alongside.
In other areas, parts of the wall may have been carried away by two thousand years of erosion, while other apparent ‘gaps’ may indicate areas where an earlier defensive feature – a wooden fence perhaps, or a river – no longer exists.
For the workers, it was a tough job, but also seems to have been a matter of pride. The Qin legal statutes decreed that only former workers could be put in charge of work-gangs. Officials were forbidden from putting anyone in charge of a wall-building platoon who had not lifted rocks himself – whether this is to save the labourers from overwork, or the superviser from attack is not clear. At least, according to the records, the workers did not go hungry; while the toil may have been arduous and dangerous, Wall-builders were relatively well fed; the successful Qin dynasty irrigation projects, themselves often constructed with slave labour, had seen to that.5
The early 20th century traveller William Geil collected many folktales during his walk along the length of the Great Wall. In one village alone, among locals so backward that the sight of a photograph noticeably spooked them, Geil heard that the Wall was constructed by Ying Zheng himself, riding a magical horse borne on the clouds. Three times in each Chinese league, Ying Zheng stamped his foot, causing a tower to spring up.
Tall tales have rules of their own. Pick an inexplicable phenomenon, and stories of gods and demons soon follow. But other elements of the Geil accounts seem to contain references to long-forgotten truths. When the peasants of the Chinese interior talk of the First Emperor ‘stamping his feet’, are they repeating their ancestors’ tales of the way the rammed earth Wall was constructed? Other folktales claim that there were eighteen suns in the sky while the Wall was built, perhaps a reference to the never-ending shift work. Men, says the Geil account, ‘worked so long that grass had time to grow in the dust which lodged in their heads’, perhaps an oblique reference to the arrival of shaven convicts who soon gained stubble.
One of the most telling elements of the Chinese folk stories is the sheer disbelief occasioned by the wall. Geil’s interviewees spoke of magic because they could not comprehend the organisational alternative. They speak of the First Emperor having a giant shovel that could fling up an entire stretch of wall in a day – a preposterous story, but one that may contain a dim memory of the speed with which so many thousands of workers could accomplish their tasks. But for those who huddled in the shadow of the Wall two millennia after its construction, the simplest explanation lay in tales that bore an uncanny resemblance to the ancient stories of a golden age. To Geil’s interviewees, a venture like the wall was simply a modern impossibility – the ancients had only managed it because they were twelve feet tall, not puny like modern men. Another version of the same story adds the evidence of bones ‘four feet long’ – did elephants form an unrecorded component among the builders, or did the locals simply stumble upon dinosaur fossils?6
Similar confusions may have informed another tale, in which the Qin policy of manacling enslaved wall-builders, appears to have transformed into another magical story. An unnamed deity supposedly took pity on the cruel tyranny of the First Emperor, and sent down a magical thread from heaven that bound the workers together. The thread gave them combined strength, such that the Emperor was inspired to use it to make a whip, which only inspired the workers to still greater achievements.
An oft-repeated folktale, even in modern China, claims that Meng Tian’s idle days of wall-building supervision led to an important discovery. Inspired by the daily sight of the lashed workers, or driven to experimentation by many inactive hours spent sitting in a tent and swatting flies, Meng Tian had an idea. Instead of scratching his communiqués to Xianyang on strips of bamboo, he painted them. His early prototypes may have involved a piece of wood terminating in a leather flap; later on, he hit upon something that seemed based on a fly swat, its business end comprising a clump of animal hair. When dipped into a pot of ink, the tuft of hair would retain enough of it to permit the wielder to daub a character on a suitable surface, and not only the traditional bamboo strip or wooden slat. The invention of paper was still centuries away, but the use of this new device would permit writing on silk. Meng Tian, so the legend goes, had invented the brush.
Just as it linked earlier fortifications, the magnitude of the Wall drew older legends to it. One tale, about Meng Jiang-nü, the anguished widow of a wall-builder, is now associated with the Qin wall, even though it was first recorded centuries earlier. According to the original, a wife made a long journey to a wall between Qi and Lu, long before the time of the Qin emperor. When she discovered that her husband had died during his hard-labour sentence, her desolate scream caused a section of a city’s walls to crumble. After the building of the Great Wall, the tale was relocated, its characters renamed, until by the Tang dynasty it was the tale of a faithful wife, bringing winter clothes to her husband in one of Meng Tian’s work parties. The tragic woman was memorialised in plays and poetry, and even had temples built in her honour.
As time passed, and sections of the wall were more likely to be found in disrepair, the opportunities to discuss mythical reasons for it only grew. By the 20th century, the tale had taken on still more folkloric aspects. Some in the Chinese hinterland now claimed that the Great Wall had originally encircled China completely, but that the widow’s screams had destroyed an entirely legendary southern section, presumed to reach from the mouth of the Yangtze all the way to Tibet. In another variant found at a different part of the Wall’s course, the widow’s screams brought down the Wall for a reason: to expose the corpses of the men buried inside. Biting her finger, she walked among the bodies until her falling blood landed on a corpse that moved, thereby identifying her loving husband in order to arrange for his proper burial. 7
The predictably high number of deaths among the slave l
abourers led to other stories, seemingly inspired by accounts of the burying of bodies within the wall. The most famous capitalises on the First Emperor’s reputation for strange superstitions, claiming that a soothsayer advised him the Wall would never be completed until ten thousand men had been buried within it. Supposedly, such a prophecy was too much even for the heartless Ying Zheng, although he was able to find a compromise that was lucky for almost everyone. He sent his men to scour the workers until they found a man called Wan, ‘ten thousand’, and buried him inside the wall instead.
Tales of men bricked up beneath the fortifications, coupled with later views of collapsed cross-sections, inspired later generations to suggest that the Wall contained hidden rooms full of buried treasure. In a tale that may bear an indirect relation to that of Ali Baba in the Arabian Nights, the peasants of Central Asia described a tramp in ancient times, who gained access one of the First Emperor’s treasure hoards through a secret door. However, he was trapped inside the room until he dropped all the gold and jewels he was carrying, after which the gods supposedly emptied the chamber to prevent anyone else gaining access.8
Not all of the wall-workers were men. One of the many criminal sentences for women of the Qin era was that of ‘rice-pounder’, originally assumed by translators to mean the preparation of food or milling of grains. However, the sentence may not have referred to agricultural hard-labour, but to a posting in the Wall zone, chained in a line, tamping endless buckets of rice into paste for use in the making of Wall cement. 9
Later generations were unable to reproduce the incredible hardness and sticking power of the Wall’s mortar, and claimed that it had magical properties. Lumps of it were prised from ruins of the Wall and ground into powder by alchemists, who claimed it would heal wounds. One of Geil’s 20th century folklore sources repeated a formula for treating cuts and burns, using a salve made of equal parts ground Wall mortar and mouse embryo. A speck of Wall mortar the size of a lotus seed could also be taken internally as a cure for stomachache. 10
The combination of many earlier fortifications also led to many apparent dead-ends in the Great Wall, particularly in later centuries where an abutment that once ran into a river might be left high and dry. Local folklore even supplied an explanation for that, discounting the extreme organisation of the historical Wall in favour of a haphazard scheme, claiming that the Wall builders were forced to mark their foundations in the trail left by the dragged saddle of the First Emperor’s horse. This, supposedly, was the random origin of some of the Wall’s stranger choices of direction.
Other tales similarly invert cause and effect. One original aim of the Qin wall was undoubtedly to keep out the northern nomads, but also to mark the edge of Qin territory. Later generations in central China, witnessing the harsh desert to the north, would claim that the wall functioned as a barrier to feng shui, and that the reason for the desert was that civilisation was blocked from advancing further. The Wall even lent its mystique to places far away. Chinese legend held that the savage races of the hinterland owed their small stature and rough existence to their origins as workers who had fled the Wall to eke out a meagre existence in the deserts and mountains. 11
The construction of the Great Wall took many years, and would occupy servants of the First Emperor for the rest of his life. But he took an interest in it from the earliest days of its construction. Only a few months after the last of the rival states had fallen, the First Emperor left Xianyang to see the Wall zone for himself.
It was in 220 that the First Emperor and his entourage made the first of several inspection trips, heading west up the Wei river, into the highlands. His journey took him up past the former capitals of Qin when it had been nothing but a military outpost, and up beyond the source of the Wei river, to the place where his great grandfather, the Bright King, had constructed an earlier wall to mark Qin’s eastern frontiers.
At Long-xi, the First Emperor could stand on the rammed earth rampart and gaze towards the west, secure in the knowledge that his domain was safe. The First Emperor then travelled west along the old wall, before turning back down one of the Wei tributaries to the fort of Beidi, and after a brief detour to Mount Jidou, presumably for an unrecorded ceremony, he passed back through the town of Huizhong and to his capital once more. Although the journey barely described the borders of ancestral Qin, it was still several hundred miles, and appears to have proved somewhat more arduous than expected. On his return, the First Emperor ordered for the construction of better roads, and, to show that he wasn’t all bad, advanced everyone in his empire by one rank. 12
Having seen the wastes of his empire’s far east, the First Emperor announced that his next inspection tour would be considerably farther ranging, taking in the eastern shores where his domain fell into the limitless ocean. On the way, he would visit the gods themselves, and let them know that he was the ruler of the world.
6 The Burning of the Books
The place of pilgrimage for the kings of old was Mount Tai, the tall peak that sat on the borders of the old homeland of the great sage Confucius, now firmly within the realm of the First Emperor. Although the Qin dynasty had already ridden roughshod over many traditions, the First Emperor seemed keen to order a trip to Mount Tai. Getting there would utilise the new imperial roads, and also permit him to examine some of the outlying regions of his empire for the first time – while the First Emperor is renowned as the conqueror of China, much of the conquering had actually been done by others.
En route, the First Emperor’s party left a memorial stone at Mount Yi, outlining their successes. Later legends would arise concerning the stone, claiming that its carving was personally supervised by Li Si, and hence the most perfect version of his approved ‘small script’ calligraphy. The place became a place of constant pilgrimage for later generations of scholars, all hoping to take a rubbing from the monument to aid their own presentation. The locals became so incensed at the constant arrivals of tourists, that they eventually destroyed part of the monument with fire. This proved to be of little use in deterring tourists who, so claimed a Tang dynasty almanac, ‘kept coming like arrows.’ Eventually, a copy was made and set up in the prefectural office for public consultation, thereby allowing the villagers to get on with their lives undisturbed.1
The stone memorial was the first of many attempts by the Qin administration to make its presence felt in the empire, but the journey to Mount Tai was the most important. Traditionally, new rulers were supposed to construct an altar terrace on the summit, where they would make their devotions to heaven, before journeying back down the mountainside to a small hillock near its base, where they would offer similar prayers to the earth. However, the nature of such ceremonies was beyond the martial people of Qin, causing the First Emperor to send for local scholars to advise him.
Here, perhaps, we see the first intimations of a deeper insecurity, almost a sense of class anxiety. Confucius and other scholars of old had left many detailed instructions on the correct way to maintain the mandate of heaven, but the Qin dynasty had been too busy fighting wars to pay much attention. Even the learned men in the First Emperor’s entourage were at a loss – practical matters were fine, but getting the ceremonies exactly right required advice from outsiders.
Even so, the First Emperor wasn’t really listening. After consulting with several dozen Confucians in the Mount Tai region, his advisers informed him that Mount Tai was wholly sacred, such that not even the ancient kings would dare to harm it. Instead, they would wrap the wheels of their carriages in cattail leaves, so that their progress along the mountain road would be softer and less liable to leave tracks or ruts, or damage the plants.
Initially, the First Emperor complied, only to sit impatiently in his carriage as it lumbered with increased slowness on its padded wheels. In what appears to have been a track too hazardous for horses, the First Emperor’s carriage was pulled by his own followers, who found it hard-going when much of the traction had been compromised by, of all things, l
eaves.
Eventually, the First Emperor tired of the charade, and announced that men without number had perished before his armies, and he was not about to admit defeat to trees and grass. He ordered the wheels unwrapped, and for attendants to march ahead with knives, hacking a path through the undergrowth.
At the summit, he performed the required ceremonies with due solemnity, only to be interrupted by a storm. As the wind rose up and dark clouds threatened a downpour, attendants began to wonder if it were a sign. The First Emperor’s decrees made it plain over and over again that he was the rightful ruler of the world, chosen by the gods, and yet the gods chose to ruin his big ceremony with bad weather. One could not simply ignore bad omens while reiterating the good, there were far too many witnesses for that. Whether the First Emperor was superstitious or not, he was obliged to at least pretend to be.
As the rain began pouring, the First Emperor was forced to curtail his ceremony and dash for cover, huddling in his wet robes underneath a pine tree. While thunder rattled around the mountaintop, the First Emperor reportedly asked the tree for mercy. Some time later, in honour of the occasion, he conferred the rank of Junior Grand Master on it.2
Bedraggled and somewhat cowed, the imperial party made its way back down the mountainside to Liangfu hill to perform the companion ceremony to the earth. There, according to the Record of the Historian, he also erected a stone tablet that stated his achievements for all to see:
The First Emperor is ordained, decrees made, laws elucidated, heeded by his loyal subjects. In the 26th year [of his reign], all under heaven is united, all obey his word. He cares for the Black Headed People in distant corners; he ascends Mount Tai and views the eastern end. His obedient subjects mark his deeds from their very beginning, and celebrate his virtues. His politics progress, all things find their place, all have laws to define them. Great and manifest, his quality transcends the generations, to be borne without alteration. The holy Emperor, pacifier of all under heaven, reigns without tiring. He rises early, retires late, makes plans that long bring benefits, and offers wise counsel. His teachings spread to the distance, near and far find order according to his will. High and low are separated and clarified, men and women behave accordingly, each to their allotted roles. His glory permeates within and without, [so that] everywhere there is peace and quiet, which will extend to prosperity. May his influence reach to infinity, all receive and follow this testament, and ever accept these solemn precepts.3
The First Emperor of China Page 13
