Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  DESCRIPTION: Steel sabre with a ten-character inscription

  SIGNIFICANCE: Personal weapon belonging to Commander Qi Jiguang (1528–1588)

  ORIGIN: Made at a foundry in Shandong in 1581

  LOCATION: National Museum of China, Beijing

  Qi Jiguang’s tenure as commander of the Jizhen Military Region, one of the nine military border regions (see Objects 37 and 38) spanned sixteen years, from 1567 to 1583, so it would seem that this was his trusty sword for the concluding two years of his service at the Wall. Geographically, his border defences stretched from the capital to Bohai Gulf. Although he was ousted in 1583 and sent south into exile, dying there in 1588, we shall discover that neither dismissal nor death could diminish what is without question a truly monumental legacy.

  Qi Jiguang’s career at the Wall began in 1567, but his calling originated in the autumn of 1550, when he was in Beijing and experienced at close quarters a vitally significant event. Virtually unopposed, 10 000 Tumed Mongols, led by Altan Khan, a seasoned raider of Chinese border towns since the 1530s, stormed through the Gubeikou Pass, just 120 kilometres north-east of the capital. Altan Khan’s approaching cavalry sent the capital into siege mode behind its lofty city wall. Among the 700 000 inhabitants was the young Qi Jiguang, aged twenty-two, who was visiting from Shandong to undertake his written and martial military examinations.

  The marauders plundered the countryside between the Great Wall and Beijing for two weeks, and then, to everyone’s relief, turned north again. An army was called to cut them off. They’d come south through the Wall virtually unopposed, but could they get back through it with carts laden with booty? They succeeded.

  The double debacle pitifully illustrated the Wall’s malfunction, and had a profound influence on Qi Jiguang’s military thinking. But it would be another seventeen years before he was called up for frontier duties. In Beijing’s ministries, the young Qi Jiguang was still a nobody.

  He returned south, charged with confronting a growing menace: Japanese pirates who not only made perilous the sea routes along China’s coastline, but now were attacking coastal communities. They also made ever deeper forays inland, including one rampage as far as the ‘southern capital’, Nanjing. Although these pirates posed no direct threat to Ming sovereignty, the havoc they wrought was capable of triggering peasant discontent, civil unrest, poor harvests, empty granaries, reduced tax incomes – and thus rebellion. Accordingly, Qi Jiguang’s task had real political importance.

  He gained the upper hand in the fight against the so-called Wo Kou, or ‘Dwarf Bandits’, winning recognition in Beijing from the capable Grand Secretary, prime minister per se, Zhang Juzheng. Qi Jiguang’s moment finally arrived in 1567, when the Jiajing Emperor, who had reigned since 1521, died. The installation of the new sovereign, the Longqing Emperor, provided the perfect opportunity for a changing of guard. With the prime minister’s support, Qi Jiguang was summoned to Beijing.

  New to the north, and new to fighting nomads, Qi Jiguang rode several thousand li to inspect the existing defences. He wished to understand where they were, who was manning them and how. Ultimately, he had to answer the question that had churned in his mind ever since 1550: how could the Wall be such a great failure?

  When Qi Jiguang arrived, the Wall was infrequently dotted with small, blocky structures called ‘battle platforms’, whose shed-like sentry posts provided only very limited garrisoning and storage space to a handful of disgruntled, dispirited troops. He probed their psychology, tested their effectiveness and morale, and listened to them as they talked about their hardships.

  Concluding that the Wall was seriously undermanned, Qi Jiguang proposed an entirely new design, and stressed that these new-era structures had to be close enough together to permit the guards in adjacent towers to defend the rampart between them. He presented his vision in a ‘memorial’, or policy proposal, to the Longqing Emperor in 1569, advising the construction of 3100 new towers: the famous kongxing dilou.

  Wherever his plans were carried out, the Wall was transformed into an imposing edifice that, with the passage of centuries, has matured into what today remains as environmental art. Architecturally speaking, this is the classic Dragon Wall, and it defines the ‘Period of Grandeur’. Its signature structures are processions of kongxing dilou, literally ‘towers with enclosed spaces’, or chambers and aisles. They are perched foursquare at every peak, trough and turn, like guards on sentry duty. Along the vast section from the capital to the ocean, Jinshanling has the Ming Wall par excellence.

  In this enclave of antiquity we can imagine ourselves back in time: we might see the servicing of the towers, the annual clearing of bush in front of the defence, the burial of landmines in the gullies, the scattering of caltrops, target practice, sword play, and wolfsmoke drills. Here Qi Jiguang achieved his vision of transforming a dormant shield, mere hardware, into a grand, imposing line of defence, invigorated by garrisons of well-trained soldiers brimming with self-belief, with twenty or more assigned to each tower.

  Some of the towers have domed interiors which make me think of the magnificent curved span of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Beneath that, one finds a modest Latin inscription marking the resting place of its architect, Sir Christopher Wren: ‘Reader, if you seek his monument, look around.’ One has the same feeling at Jinshanling: ‘Walker, if you seek his monument, continue east to the Yellow Sea.’

  As we do, we see section after section of Wall that underwent the Qi Jiguang makeover. In scores of locations we find the field commander’s name inscribed on tablets, recording his inspection visits. We see his statue in Wall-side towns. Yet his legacy is not only in the defences he built, but in the inspiration he generated.

  Inland from Shanhaiguan, the village of Chengziyu, in Hebei’s Funing County, is nestled below the Wall. There, I met Zhang Heshan, who claims descent from a Wall-building family and talks of Commander Qi Jiguang as if he were not a distant historical character, but someone much closer. Zhang’s ancestors were among the 4000-strong group of loyal fighters – dubbed Qi’s Army – that originally accompanied him north to the Wall.

  Zhang led me up to a section of Wall over which (by inheritance) he has assumed stewardship. We reached Xifu Lou, or ‘The Women’s Tower’, just as dawn sunlight illuminated a rare, carved doorway adorned with flowers, vases and the Chinese characters Zong Yi Bao Guo, or ‘Defend the Country Patriotically’, said to be in the hand of Qi Jiguang.

  Despite all this, we shouldn’t assume that Qi Jiguang got everything he wanted. All the way, he faced logistical and financial hurdles, and eventually political problems that would lead to his exiled ‘retirement’.

  You only have to stand in one of Qi’s towers to appreciate the scale and the challenges of his grand makeover proposal – and the sheer cost. Adding so many towers was simply an enormous undertaking. Building new towers and converting existing platforms required engineers and builders who could construct roofs and archways and understand spans and stress. Aside from the construction itself, kilns had to produce thousands upon thousands of bricks. All of this required a very large and sustained flow of money.

  The Ming economy, however, was spiralling into recession in the aftermath of the so-called Jiajing Earthquake of 1556. This disaster – the most devastating earthquake in recorded history, in terms of immediate loss of life – caused 800 000 people to perish, and ruptured dykes along the lower reaches of the Yellow River, flooding farmland, reducing output, lowering tax incomes and causing granaries to be emptied.

  With cash so hard to find, ‘only’ 1000 or so of Qi Jiguang’s planned 3100 towers were built, mainly between 1569 and 1571. But as the funds for this ‘hardware’ investment dried up, Qi Jiguang managed to maintain the effective momentum of his makeover by improving the Wall’s ‘software’ – its men and their fighting spirit. He wrote his theories and drills in Lianbing Shiji, or ‘Records of Military Training’, and organised a military show involving 100 000 soldiers, with Prime Ministe
r Zhang Juzheng in attendance. In the wake of this event, he led his men north of the Wall in 1573 to defeat the Duoyan tribe, and the Xiao Wangzi tribe in 1579. For sixteen years under his authority, the Ming held the upper hand against their nomadic adversaries. Despite this dominance, Qi Jiguang lost favour after Zhang Juzheng died. Feared as being militarily too popular and strong, in 1583 he was posted to far-off Guangdong Province, never again to see the Wall he did so much to strengthen.

  I began retracing Qi Jiguang’s career at the Wall in the crowded National Museum of China, in Beijing. As I peered into the glass cabinet there, I wondered: how had this one man merited having his sword displayed here?

  I found the answer in many places, but perhaps most evocatively in front of a large granite boulder in a lonely valley beside a river that weaves its course through Hebei’s Funing County. The rock’s flat face bears a poetic tribute to Qi Jiguang, composed by two of his officers, and marks the place where they prepared a field banquet to celebrate their commander’s fifty-third birthday. ‘May you outlive the mountains and rivers,’ they wrote.

  When I look up at his watchtowers, I understand why he is still the Ming Wall’s most outstanding personality, the man who made the Wall work. He sharpened the Dragon’s teeth. He modernised it. He reinvented the Wall.

  37.

  View from the High Command

  ‘Map of the Nine Border Regions’

  When I confront the famous Jiubian Tu, or ‘Map of the Nine Border Regions’, I can’t pretend it is immediately clear to me. Although the map is very large and richly coloured, it appears disorienting and confusing. It seems as much a painting as a map. For most of its length, the Wall is largely camouflaged within a green-brown, jungle-like landscape. Trying to follow its route is like tracking a snake wriggling away in the grass. First, then, let’s explore the map’s visual content – its shape, colours and symbols – and then we’ll consider its textual content.

  Almost without realising it, we intuitively try to position ourselves on any map by working out its geographical coverage. But whoever made this map didn’t top it with a title, grand or otherwise. Nor did he tell us the map’s length or breadth. As it lacks scale, we need to look out for distinct markers or shapes – the clearest of which are usually coastlines.

  We pay attention to coastlines because they functioned as our umbilical cord when we first ventured out of the area we knew. I use ‘we’ in its original, general form, referring to our common ancestors in East Africa. Sixty thousand or so years ago, we followed coastlines on our journey on foot out of Africa and began to explore the world. Even six hundred years ago, maritime voyages of discovery preferred to stay within sight of the shoreline.

  On the Jiubian Tu we find a stretch of coastline in the map’s bottom-right corner – but it’s neither long enough nor distinctively enough shaped to help us orient ourselves. It appears to be surrounded by land, so it must be some kind of inlet or gulf. Still, we can deduce that we’re probably looking at a regional map, and that we are focused on an area of special interest.

  The colours of the Earth’s features – of landscapes and landforms – have often been replicated in maps. Yet, even allowing for this map’s colour changes over the centuries – fading, damage by dampness and pigment breakdown – it seems that our cartographer didn’t use his paint box to the full. One senses an impressionist approach in this map, rather than geographical, and our mapmaker has overdone his one and only in green. In doing so, he takes us to a mountainous jungle.

  Inland from the coast, we find a number of shapes that command our attention: curved natural features and straight-edged manmade structures. The most frequently represented objects on this map are the green, pyramidal peaks (commonly shown in threes, like the Chinese character 山 or shan, meaning ‘mountain’), which sometimes appear in chains or clusters.

  Between and beyond them come the other dominant shapes: hundreds of blocky structures, of various sizes, with thick walls and symmetrical openings at the four cardinal points. A visual scan of the whole map tells me there are as many as 500, and fifteen or so of them are much larger than the others. Their distribution gives some parts of the landscape a suburban feel, and seems to show fairly heavily populated regions separated by empty countryside. This, however, is a distortion created by artistic representation. If drawn to scale, the structures – actually fortified military bases – would only merit being marked as tiny dots.

  Next we should look at the elongated shapes and symbols. The most prominent is curvy, wide and dark-brown, and appears on the left-hand side from top to bottom. It turns out to be the map’s key marker, a giveaway shape that should be recognised by any primary school student: the Yellow River.

  Another linear feature is somewhat harder to follow. It’s curvy in parts, straight in others, and it traverses the whole width of the map. It looks to be part natural, part manmade. Across the big bend of the Yellow River, it takes a straighter, more direct course. East of the river, it heads directly over mountaintops. It’s not a single line, but divides and reconnects, and several offshoots can be identified. Along its entire length, at set intervals, are towers. Beneath this linear structure we find almost all the military bases; above it there are only a few. The route of this structure appears to be another primary focus of the map.

  Although we know well the structure’s identity, its characteristic features are worth noting again. It’s been built, yet it follows – and utilises – natural features such as ridges and cliffs. It’s not a single line but has a complex, network-type layout. There is uninhabited or sparsely habited land outside (or above) it, and populated land inside (or below) it. In length, it rivals the Yellow River – it’s subcontinental in scale. It is becoming clear that we’re looking at a swathe of territory in the order of 800 kilometres in depth, and twice that in length, inland from the Bohai Gulf.

  My initial overwhelming impression of this map was its sheer size; one literally stands before it. One of mapping’s great magic qualities is its power to shrink the world, making it more understandable, more manageable. We’re used to maps that fill our computer screens, or perhaps wall maps that sit above desks in classrooms. When I move close to this map, it dwarfs me. It’s six or seven paces long, and taller than I am even with my arm stretched upwards. I suspect that these unusual dimensions are important clues as to its purpose, and its possible place of use.

  I’ve seen ‘mega-maps’ used in a few places and situations. There are examples in the Doge’s Palace in Venice, and in the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican, both of great decorative and informative beauty. Other examples are in war movies. The Cabinet War Rooms in London – from where Churchill directed World War II – are an underground chain of rooms adorned with mega-maps that covered entire walls, showing the front line, the Allied territory and ‘theirs’, troop concentrations and movements and the like.

  This was likely also the purpose of our map. It was made for the high command. It was large so it could be seen used by military top brass in some sort of war operations room.

  It shows the Ming Great Wall, but in a way we’ve never seen it before. The last ancient map showing a Great Wall that we looked at was the Huayi Tu (see Object 13), drawn in the mid-Tang, circa AD 800, by Jia Dan. It showed a Wall sweeping arc-like across China’s north. The position of the Wall was approximate and symbolic; it showed simply that a Wall was somewhere up there. Seven centuries brought no improvement in cartographic detail – even during the mid-Ming, the Wall was shown on national maps equally inaccurately. It was still just an arc. Hearsay and imagination have been the sources for marking the Wall.

  The maker of this map put the Ming Great Wall, as well as the military bases in the area, at the top of his list of inclusions. They were the very reason for the map. He had experience in the region. He was an insider. He produced what was tantamount to the first specialised Great Wall map. And he produced his map for other insiders. It’s what today might be in the neibu kan category of Ch
inese document – for internal use only, specifically by the military, and that means the Board of War.

  Now it’s time to actually read the map. The largest text block, fourteen lines of characters, is at the top left in panel number two, and turns out to be the author’s foreword. From it we learn that Xu Lun produced this map in 1534, that it’s called Jiubian Tu, or ‘Map of the Nine Border Regions’, and that it’s based on his treatise Bian Lun, or ‘Border Commentary’. Additionally, he makes various expected patriotic statements, hoping that his efforts will be of some strategic value, and unexpectedly tells us his age. He compiled the map at the age of forty-seven, when most men in the Ming period were retired, if not dead. Moreover, it transpires that the map didn’t even mark the peak of Xu Lun’s military achievements, but only the beginning.

  Exploring the hinterland of Xu Lun’s map, we discover that it’s bilingual – in Chinese and Manchu, indicating that this example is a later edition, from as early as 1625, a period when there was great demand for border intelligence. Reading it, we can see border regions’ place names, read various ‘signposts’ telling us how far it is to adjacent bases, and, in some locations, we can tell from the placement of ‘boundary posts’ where one region’s administration ended and another’s began.