Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  Running on from this is a second, unconnected part of the text, totalling seventy-nine characters. Its content offers little of value, although it is mildly entertaining. It’s likely to have been a communication sent from our man, the writer, surnamed Shi, to a superior at a nearby watchtower. It reads:

  Highly respected brother, I should kneel before you to express my respect, at your feet where I belong as an insignificant, I’m awed at your example of guarding the border in the inclement weather on frugal rations, and though your heart is bitter you remain unceasingly observant in your frontier defence duties. Should you or your men pass our watchtower, we will generously accord you our great hospitality.

  Veritable juxtaposition. Clearly, neither text is in situ. Part one is likely to have been issued as an internal military circular – or, more aptly, a ‘linear’, as it would have been relayed along the Wall. This testament cum valedictory is unique, preserved in no other form, on no other surface. The note which follows is mere grovelling praise from a lower to a higher rank. Read separately, the messages make some sense. Together, they seem like nonsense.

  DESCRIPTION: A polyhedral mujian, or wooden border document; its six faces are inscribed with a total of 212 Chinese characters

  SIGNIFICANCE: A marker of literacy, newly required of Han army officers engaged in frontier defence work

  ORIGIN: Made in Yumenhuahai, today’s Gansu Province, towards the end of Emperor Han Wudi’s reign, circa 90 BC, and excavated at a watchtower on the Han Wall

  LOCATION: Jiayuguan Great Wall Museum

  I think we should be less preoccupied with the content of the mugu and more concerned with the reasons for its creation. To this end, the key questions we must answer, if we are to understand the object’s purpose and its place in our Great Wall story, are: what was the writer doing, and why? To me, literacy seems to be a good motive: his position, which saw him in charge of a watchtower and a number of men, demanded it. He needed to read incoming messages and send them out, and to have a skill that the men he commanded didn’t.

  From the abundance of mujian found at the Han Wall in Gansu and Inner Mongolia, we have much reason to believe that in the mid-Han Wudi period (circa 120 BC), literacy grew to be regarded as an essential military qualification in officers, alongside the more traditional martial attributes of valour, strength, discipline, a sense of duty, theoretical knowledge and practical experience in the art of war, as well as archery and martial arts skills. The Han Wall became more than just a barricaded frontier: it was also a busy signalling line and communications route. Those in positions of authority – the suizhang at each watchtower, at least – needed to be able to read and write.

  But literacy requires practice. Our writer, making his own attempts to improve, used his knife to whittle down a tree branch and create a large surface area for writing exercises. Just as primary school children often do today in China, he sought some handwriting of quality to copy, first picking up a clutch of adjoined mujian. These happened to have important content, which had been circulated throughout the army: news that the Crown Prince had been chosen. The original document would certainly have extended to more than several mujian. Our writer copied what text he had, but still had space left. So he picked up another document, which just happened to be unimportant. That didn’t matter; it still allowed him to practise his writing.

  As it happens, the most sweeping reform of the Chinese writing system occurred during the Han Dynasty, just at the time our officer was engaged in his lishu-character handwriting practice. These are geometrically constructed characters and are written according to certain rules, known as a stroke order. The writer built up his characters stroke by stroke, with each stroke having a name, number by number. Previously, character scripts were rounded, and based on expression of meaning by showing a picture. Known as guwen, or ‘ancient script’, these came in a series of different fonts, as we’d call them nowadays, but they were curved and difficult to copy and remember. Lishu characters simplified writing, allowing it to become a more common skill.

  The frontier built and operated by Han Wudi required manning not only by men trained to fight, but also by soldiers with important new skills: the ability to write, send, receive, read, understand and interpret military orders and intelligence. This oddly shaped chunk of wood found in the sand, tantamount to a sheet of scrap paper screwed up and tossed to the ground, tells us that one man spent an hour or so of his spare time, in the shadow of a tall watchtower on the Han Wall, preparing himself to be a better soldier – not by sparring, swordplay or target practice, but with brush and wood in hand, writing.

  13.

  Past Glories

  ‘Map of China and the Barbarian Lands’ stele rubbing

  There’s no more effective reminder of the staying power of the Great Wall than to see it routed across a contemporary map. My latest map of modern China shows both the country’s high-speed railway lines, all built over the last five years, and the remains of the Ming Great Wall, built five centuries ago. This juxtaposition of megastructures is not an anachronism. The Wall isn’t marked as an imaginary line, nor is it decorative. Long and continuous sections of the Ming structure still stand, and I can use my map to find them.

  Once there, no matter where I am, where I climb to, how good my eyesight is or how crystal-clear the visibility might be, I can see maybe thirty kilometres of the whole structure at best. Wherever I stand, I’m aware that there is so much more beyond, behind and before me. My map can give me what first-hand experience cannot: a subcontinental view. The power of scale makes maps unique tools when we wish to understand the Wall’s totality.

  The object I’m searching for is the cartographic ‘before’, and it’s to be found on older maps that preserve the Wall’s historical geography. But how far back into history must I travel to see the earliest surviving map that shows a Great Wall?

  There appears to be nothing earlier than the Huayi Tu, or ‘Map of China and the Barbarian Lands’, a large map carved into a stone slab. Dating from the 1130s, it measures 114 square centimetres. I’m looking at a vermillion rubbing of the map held by the National Library of China. It’s an impressive and mysterious depiction. For one thing, it’s titled Huayi Tu, which translates directly as ‘China– Barbarian Map’, which I regard as a synonym for the Great Wall ‘conflict’. It follows, too, that this is a dedicated ‘Great Wall’ map per se. For Cao Song (828–903), a Tang poet, it represented a national zenith. In his poem ‘Perusing the Huayi Tu’, he wrote:

  In brush strokes the Earth is shrunk

  Unfurling the map I feel peace

  The Chinese occupy the place of prominence

  Under which distant stars lie the border areas?

  The Wall is drawn boldly, the dominant symbol on the map. It’s represented by a battlement-like symbol that was adopted and varied by successive cartographers to depict the Great Walls of various dynasties over the centuries. Two continuous sections are marked. The Wall enters at the map’s north-eastern edge. It proceeds westward and then curves down, towards the south-west, within the great bend of the Yellow River, terminating near Mintao. Further to the north-west, on the far side of the Yellow River, a second but shorter segment of the Wall is depicted, stretching from Juyan to Yumenguan.

  The cartographer’s focus, then, is the Hua–Yi (or ‘China–Barbarian’) conflict, and this fact is reinforced by the position and contents of box-like chunks of text that surround the map proper, describing the appearances and characteristics of the peoples on the peripheries. Spatially, they are ‘outside’, whether they be beyond the Wall to the north, across the sea to the east, or over the mountains and deserts to the far west. One block of text to the immediate right of the title describes the Wall as Gu Changcheng, or the ‘ancient Great Wall’, confirming that the Wall was already obsolete at the time of the map’s original production, during the Tang Dynasty.

  DESCRIPTION: The Huayi Tu, or ‘Map of China and the Barbarian Lands’

&n
bsp; SIGNIFICANCE: The earliest extant image of any Great Wall

  ORIGIN: Based on a map drawn AD 80 I, copied onto a stone in AD 1136

  LOCATION: National Library of China, Beijing; the original stela is thought to be in the collection of the Forest of Steles Museum, Xi’an, Shaanxi Province

  But was the Wall marked as an imaginary relic or a physically visible one? And which dynastic Wall does it show? To learn the answers, we need to appreciate a little more about this map’s genesis.

  Text on the map tells us the stone was engraved later Shuo Qixue in 1136, and that he based his work on a previous work, by Jia Dan (730–805), a scholar-official and cartographer who was commissioned to draw a map by the Dezong Emperor (who reigned between 780 and 805). The very large map that Jia Dan constructed was said to have measured 9 metres by 10 metres; it was apparently covered with a grid of squares measuring one cun; each cun equated to 100 li, which made it a 1:1 500 000 scale map.

  It’s rational to assume that one reason the original Tang map was downsized and copied onto stone during the Song was to preserve what might eventually have been lost – as, indeed, the paper copy was. However, that was not the primary motive. Engraved slabs were produced specifically to function as templates for reproduction later named Shuo Qixue copied Jia Dan’s map onto a stone in response to political changes that created social and market demands: a need for multiple paper copies.

  The size and illustrative style of the stone suggest explicitly that it was not intended for display, but as a surface for reproduction. Such a copying process involves at least five stages. The first step is to fix the paper to the stone, by ‘pressing’ it with a damp towel. The second is to force the paper into the carvings by means of da zi, a hitting action using a stiff brush. Third is drying. Next comes the first application of ink by ‘thumping’; this stage is repeated two or three more times to attain an even application. Finally, the paper is carefully peeled off the stone. The whole job takes about an hour.

  The rubbing I inspected was produced in the first half of the twentieth century. Despite repeated efforts, I have never been allowed to see the actual stele. ‘Nobody, not even Chinese, let alone foreigners, is allowed to see the stone, and it’s forbidden to discuss it because it presents political problems,’ said the curator’s office in the mid-1990s. The probable reason is that the map doesn’t show Taiwan as an island. In fact, it doesn’t show Taiwan at all.

  Jia Dan made his large map in 801. Its size indicated it as having been designed for imperial use – just imagine what a rigmarole it must have been to unfurl and hang up such a large map. Shuo Qixue engraved his downsized Huayi Tu in stone in order to enable the creation of copies of more manageable size, for use by a wider audience. The cartographic business was lucrative. Interestingly, just as we use both sides of a sheet of paper to save trees and cash, Shuo Qixue used both sides of this stone: the opposite surface has another map carved upon it. The dual use hints at commerce. But who, then, were the map’s customers, and what had changed to produce the demand?

  Wu Shu, a Song Dynasty official in the Bureau of Military Affairs, which was responsible for the maintenance of the state’s annually updated maps, stated:

  All maps are for the sole use of His Majesty and the military. Others found using them privately, or in secret, and foreigners found with them should be punished. All maps are to be stamped, inventoried and stored securely. Authorised persons desiring to consult maps need to obtain his Imperial Majesty’s permission.

  During early-twelfth century Song China, however, there appears to have been a liberalisation of attitudes concerning one genre of cartography – historical maps – for the sake of furthering patriotic education. Jia Dan’s Tang map was ‘declassified’ and could now be reproduced as an educational tool. The Southern Song government wanted to remind their people that although land south of the Great Wall was overrun with Mongols, it remained Chinese.

  Beginning in the mid-tenth century, Qidan ethnics and then Tanguts supplanted Han rule in the empire’s north. By 1127 advances by Jurchens had toppled the Qidan–Liao empire, forcing the Song to pull back south of the Huai River. Han people evacuated southwards en masse, escaping the advancing tide of ‘barbarian’ rule. Never before had so many Hans been compressed into such a small territory.

  They made the best of it. Necessity spurred scientific, agricultural, commercial and cultural benefits. Trades flourished and a market economy emerged.

  The Southern Song government aimed to strengthen its control of the denser population and increase resistance against northern invaders by greatly enlarging its civil service. Determined to build on the firmest of foundations, it instigated a vigorous imperial examination system that contained a broad range of subjects; its goal was the recruitment of quality scholars. A scramble to enter the bureaucracy and climb the ladder ensued.

  As the demand for knowledge increased, the craft of stele rubbing enabled the reproduction of copies that could be used as study materials. History was a prized field of knowledge, a means for the student to learn from past events. Huayi Tu, being a summary of Han conflicts with the northern nomads, was poignantly relevant as the Jin continued its attacks on the Southern Song. Rubbings of this map provided a poster-style lesson, summarising and disseminating basic knowledge on Han–barbarian relations.

  While that was its use back then, what does it show us now, 900 years later?

  From a geographical standpoint, the map’s rendering of China’s land is immature. Any Chinese primary school pupil today could draw a better map. They have the shape of a rooster in mind when sketching their mainland, and are sternly reminded not to forget their countless number of islands, especially Taiwan. Jia Dan’s China does feature the Yellow, Yangzi and Huai rivers, as well as the Taihu, Boyang, Dongting and Qinghai lakes, but his drawing of the country’s overall outline, and especially it’s coastline, is amorphous. It lacks even minimal protrusions to show Shandong and Liaodong, while the shape of Korea’s peninsula remained unknown.

  Although the Great Wall’s route does appear to be a sweeping approximation, we can still work out its dynastic origins. Immediately before the Tang there was the Sui Great Wall, and before that several ‘lesser’ Great Walls built by Northern Dynasties, all of which were much further south than this one, and much shorter. This is a true ‘10 000 li Great Wall’ of subcontinental scale, stretching from the Gobi to Korea. Only one dynastic structure matches up with such an identity, and that’s the Western Han Dynasty Great Wall. Until it was explored by Aurel Stein in the early 1900s (see Object 14), it was thought to have its western terminus at Yumenguan, as marked on the Huayi Tu.

  Rubbings of the Huayi Tu collected in the National Library of China and Washington D.C.’s Library of Congress (thought to have been made circa 1933), among other institutions, preserve a full-length image of the Western Han Wall. At the time of the map’s reproduction, during the Southern Song, it served as a graphic reminder of the halcyon days of centuries past, when the Wall was the border and the barbarians were kept outside it.

  For the poet Lu You (1125–1210), the Huayi Tu was a map of times past, not present – part nostalgia, part lament, showing a glorious then and a grim now. Seeing it caused him much anguish:

  Living for seventy years my heart has stayed

  as it always was at the beginning,

  By mistake I see the map, and my eyes fill with tears.

  14.

  Charting Archaeology

  Stein’s sketch map of the Han Wall

  As I read Aurel Stein’s handwritten diary, and refer to his popular published account, Ruins of Desert Cathay, and his detailed field report in Serindia, I draw on my own considerable experience of the desert region in question and reconstruct the scene. It is April 1907.

  Stein wasn’t at all perturbed about riding back to camp in the dusk. After two rides along this stretch of fragmented fortifications, a much improved map was shaping up in his mind, one that he would soon transfer t
o paper. Besides, he could rely on his loyal dog, Dash, to sniff out the route they had taken on the outward ride, nine hours earlier.

  Stein was riding Badakhshi, a young stallion named after its motherland, an Afghan province on the far-flung western edge of the Qing Empire. He was accompanied by Tila Bai, the local Uyghur who was in charge of all the horses and camels. The caravan had carried Stein’s expedition all the way from Kashgar, along the southern rims of the Taklamakan Desert and the Lop Nur salt lake.

  Their camp was near, but not within ‘the Fort’, a structure much larger than the umpteen paotai, or watchtowers, that Stein was investigating along this ancient frontier. It was square, with high, thick walls and a large central enclosure, but was swarming with mosquitos and tao-zi, or midges, so they shunned it, preferring an outside spot for their several nights’ stay. This fixed camp functioned as their central base, from which to ride out, explore and excavate; it saved them precious time, relieving them of the need to make and break camp, and transport all their paraphernalia.

  Time was pressing. The summer heat would soon make desert travel impossible, and there was a mountain of archaeological and survey work still to be done. Stein’s reconnaissance rides aimed to reveal in advance ‘the task awaiting at each ruin’, and to enable selection of the ‘most suitable camping places’, close to springs.

  It had been a worthwhile day. Stein had ridden as far east as watchtower T. XVII, observing and taking compass bearings. But the onset of evening brought him no rest. On the homeward plod he further pondered the relationship between the remains of the fortifications and its host landscape.