Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  De Jode’s updated map was made as he strove to keep his family’s map-making business alive. His father, Gerard de Jode (1501–1591), had been developing an atlas, the Speculum Orbis Terrae, or ‘Mirror of the World’, which was to rival Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or ‘Theatre of the World’ (see Object 1). After Gerard’s death, Cornelis struggled to make the business pay – the atlas’ publication in 1593 proved disappointing.

  Disillusioned, he sold the printing plates of the entire atlas to the powerful Antwerp printer V. B. Vrients, in the hope that he would distribute it more successfully. But Vrients also acquired the printing plates of Ortelius’ atlas, and chose to streamline production and simplify distribution by publishing only one of the great atlases. He chose Ortelius’ Theatrum as it had an established market presence. The plates of the de Jode family’s Speculum would never be brushed with ink again.

  Cornelis de Jode began to focus on niche cartographic projects, including the production of single-sheet maps that illustrated the very latest discoveries. They were simpler, cheaper and quicker to produce than high-investment master volumes. Our Nova Totius Orbis Descriptio – which we might even translate as ‘An Updated Map of the Whole World’ – is a prime example. Its zephyrs, medallions, galleons and title vividly announce that it relied on the recent discoveries of the explorers – Drake, Cavendish, Del Cano, Magellan, Columbus and Vespucci – who captained ships on voyages of discovery between the late fifteenth and late sixteenth centuries. But as we have only a single copy of the map – perhaps it’s a proof copy – we can only speculate that it didn’t advance to wider public sales.

  The Great Wall remains the one and only individual building that graces world maps and globes to this day.

  40.

  Moving Targets

  Foreign-style ‘Border Pacification Cannon’

  With its heavy metal and hardness, length and thickness, it’s difficult not to be impressed by this gun, although I’m more intrigued by its boastful name: ‘The Mighty, Golden, Victory, Blasting, Enemy-Eliminating and Border Pacification Cannon’. There’s also a fascinating description hung around its neck which calls it a hongyi pao, or ‘foreign-style’ cannon.

  The Badaling Museum of the Great Wall has made a commendable effort to show this cannon in its context, placing it behind a mock battlement, yet to many of its viewers it inevitably remains lifeless, rather like a stuffed tiger. No longer able to roar or shake the ground, it begs to be released from captivity. I take note of its measurements in my notebook.

  In order to put this cannon back in situ, I will review it from the ramparts, where I can consider the surrounding field situation and the enemy’s nature, and thus work out if it might really have brought victory, eliminated the enemy and pacified the border. Put simply, I want to learn how significant this big gun was. Did its performance match its status as the most advanced weapon ever deployed on a Great Wall?

  What is meant by ‘a foreign-style cannon’ is much more of a conundrum, and requires a look much further afield to understand it. The pertinent question is this: if the Chinese invented gunpowder and designed the first guns, why were they styling their cannon on foreign designs? How did this world leader in hot weapons become a follower?

  DESCRIPTION: Muzzle-loading ‘foreign-type’ cannon cast in two layers, iron interior and copper exterior, by the Board of War; called ‘The Mighty, Golden, Victory, Blasting, Enemy-Eliminating and Border Pacification Cannon’; length 1.70 m, barrel diameter 22.3 cm, 8.5 cm calibre, weight 420 kg. Bears a 69-character inscription

  SIGNIFICANCE: Largest weapon-type used on the Great Wall at height of the Ming Empire; impressive yet ineffective

  ORIGIN: Dated ‘Chongzhen Wuzhen Year’, or 1628 A.D.

  LOCATION: Badaling Museum of the Great Wall, Yanqing, Beijing

  First, the easier leg of my investigation. I need to walk the ruins and find a string of paotai, or cannon platforms, which are brick table-like structures built up to the level of the battlement’s embrasure. These will tell me precisely where the big guns were put into service. The cannon is dated Chongzhen Wuzhennian, or the first year of the Chongzhen Emperor’s reign. Just sixteen years later he was driven to commit suicide, the Ming Dynasty fell and its Great Wall was abandoned and then looted.

  A Ming officer, an Inspector General Xu, has left behind picturesque details of both the Wall and the mood of its soldiers. He composed a poem just a few years before the cannon was cast, sometime in the 1620s, during the reign of the former emperor, Tianqi (1620–27). The poem was then engraved on a tablet and placed in the Wall, close to the ‘Nine Windows Tower’ – like Badaling, also in Beijing’s Yanqing District. The latter part of it reads:

  Banners and flags fluttering, our soldiers, in full armour, stand to attention

  Briskly we climb this precipitous mountain

  High above us circle eagles and vultures, lively as if in a painting

  Peace prevails, and it seems the watchtowers can be closed

  Shining brightly over the mountains are the sun and the moon

  Decorating the land of China are flowers so enchanting

  Our mighty empire is safely nestled behind the all-powerful Coiling Dragon

  There’s no need for us to retreat south for protection!

  By this account, it appears that my visit is taking place as Ming China – the third-largest unified empire in the world, with a population of 100 million, ruled from the safety of Beijing’s Forbidden City – stands tall and proud. The poem unfurls as a glowing report on the state of the Wall. The inspector coins an evocative term for it: ‘the Coiling Dragon’. Watchtowers are no longer needed, he says, and he notes the disciplined men in shining armour – but he says nothing about cannons.

  Archaeological clues such as the paotai ruins suggest that cannons were deployed only sparingly; perhaps they were limited to defence of particularly vulnerable locations. As I stand on the ramparts and imagine muzzle-loading such a cannon with two jin of gunpowder and two jin of lead shot, I realise that its target area would have been within a very narrow band. Tilting the 400-kilogram-plus barrel up or down, even with the right levers, would have been an effort. This monster was too big, slow and clumsy to have been an effective weapon against a swift-moving enemy.

  Why, then, was this ‘foreign-style’ cannon deployed at all? I think the answer lies in its boastful name, which, alongside its looks, exists primarily to impress. It’s a statement of imperial might. How it got there is a longer story, one that can only be answered much further away, way down south.

  The stage is the Zhujiang, or Pearl River, in the environs of Guangzhou, where the Chinese first laid their hands on foreign guns and cannons in around 1519, seizing them from ships from the ‘Land of Franks’ – Portugal. A Dongguan customs officer, He Ru, boarded one of the ships and saw ‘overseas Chinese’ among the crew. Surnamed Yang and Dai, they lived among the foreigners at Melaka (today’s Malacca), at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, a Chinese vassal state. Upon seeing the mobile Portuguese arsenal defending the ship, and learning that the Chinese had become acquainted with the Franks’ methods of casting such guns and making gunpowder, He Ru offered them enticing rewards to defect. The Mingshi Bingzhi, or ‘Ming History: Book of Weapons’, suggests He Ru also managed to buy some guns there and then.

  Soon after, with only tacit approval from local officials, the Portuguese landed at nearby Tunmen to trade, hastily constructing buildings and defences there. Their ‘thunderous guns’ and their rumoured wish to buy children to eat filled the local community with fear. At the death of the Zhengde Emperor (1505–1521), the Portuguese were ordered to leave, but they refused and fighting broke out. During these conflicts, more cannons were captured, soon to be copied.

  Portugal was one of the most powerful maritime powers in Europe – along with France, England, Spain, the city state of Venice, Holland and Germany. These nations were often in conflict with one another, and their regular sea battles fue
lled a European arms race, with many minor weapons improvements being made.

  A month after I inspected Badaling’s hongyi pao, which served on the land-locked frontier, I saw another cannon, one that had served on a maritime frontier and had been lifted from the seabed by marine archaeologists. These two frontiers were 8500 kilometres apart – one in northern China, the other the English Channel – but both cannons were huge, about the length of a tall man and approximately 400 kilograms in weight. Visually, they were virtually identical – in size, shape, length, design and colour. Only the inscriptions gave them away.

  The one in Chinese we know. The other, in Latin, reads ‘H I’, which stands for Henricus Invictissimus, meaning ‘Henry the Most Invincible’; it came from one of the gunships of King Henry VIII, who reigned from 1509 to 1547. Thirty-one huge English cannons were recovered from the wreckage of the ill-fated Mary Rose, which sank in July 1545. Surprisingly, the Badaling cannon, excavated locally, was cast some eighty-two years later, in 1628.

  These cannons are counterparts, and oddly so, because they were made and used continents and cultures apart. The fact that, feature by feature, the English cannon is more advanced than the Chinese signals what has happened. Although the Chinese invented gunpowder and designed the first guns and cannons, by the sixteenth century foreigners had adopted them, perfected the technology and forged ahead.

  What does all this have to do with the Great Wall? The return of an upgraded product to its native shores, where it would be used against its original inventors, turned out to be a highly significant event. The Chinese conflict against the Portuguese at Guangzhou proved to be just the first of many Sino–European military interactions.

  Historically, the Sino-nomadic relationship – largely fierce conflict – had been over products, access and trade. Denying nomads access to sought-after Chinese goods had sustained a protracted war along the northern frontier for 2000 years. Dutch and British embassies headed by diplomats would come to China in 1655 and 1793, respectively, only to have their requests to access the China market rebuffed. The denial of enough Chinese goods that home markets craved – for example, tea to the British – would lead to a real trade war. It would be fought and won by well-armed gunships, which annihilated the Chinese coastal fortifications and ships. As Henry VIII’s cannon-laden Mary Rose shows from as early as 1545, European gunships boasted formidable and highly mobile firepower.

  Eventually, ten foreign powers – eight European, as well as Japan and the United States – would come by ship to China on an international land grab that would open a new age of treaty ports along the coast and major rivers, and foreign concessions in cities. All were marks of Chinese humiliation – ironically, made possible by the spread of China’s own technology. Inventing and then losing the lead in weapons development cost China dearly, and caused a dramatic shift in military focus: away from the traditionally volatile frontier zone of the north, and towards the east and the new enemies along the coast.

  41.

  The Last Emperor

  Admonition decree from the Board of War

  Most agree that it was Qin Shihuang back in the late third century BC who was the mastermind of the Great Wall (see Object 11), but few pause to consider the other end of the Wall’s chronology. Which emperor presided over its ultimate demise?

  Chongzhen (1627–1644) was the last man to rule an empire protected by a Great Wall. He was a central figure in a tumultuous event that lies at the core of one of the most chaotic periods of Chinese history – the end of the Ming. It’s a well-known and much studied period, so my challenge is to find an object that provides some deeper insight.

  Between early February and late May of 1644, a chain reaction of events changed China, transforming the Great Wall from a military defence to a monument. On a 2014 calendar I circle the key dates and places. The next steps in my quest are clear: I will revisit the key locations in the four-month story, trusting that time and place will bring me inspiration.

  I begin at the Wall, one late winter afternoon. A pale-red sky heralds the onset of dusk; shrieking ravens tell me I’m intruding. That is what I came to do, after all – to think about the Wall’s twilight months in early 1644.

  The Wall was barely functioning that March: towers were skeletally manned, troops had long stopped training, but they hunted and collected firewood and listened – perhaps sceptically – to their commanding officers talking about the renovation work that had been postponed for several years already.

  By April, rumours were rife. From the south-west came news that a rebel army was storming its way towards the capital. From the east, scouts returning from spying forays into Liaodong (a Manchurian region) reported that the Manchus were assembling a massive cavalry army.

  May was unusual: there were none of the usual cartloads of food to relieve the bitter winter, no ministerial inspections, not even any messengers. The only normal thing was that there was no cash. The inactivity sparked immense speculation. It was said that northern China was starving, that the rebels had besieged or even taken Beijing, and killed the Emperor. Another report said the Manchu army had passed through the Wall at Shanhaiguan without having to fight at all.

  That was the view from the frontier, but how about at the empire’s heart, from the capital? The place to be was the largest hall in the Forbidden City, the date 8 February 1644. It was the dawn of the Year of the Monkey, the 276th year of the Zhu family’s continuous rule over China. Chongzhen was the fifteenth family member to inherit the mandate of heaven, the god-given right to rule, and for two and a half centuries his ancestors marked the auspicious occasion by presiding over a grand ceremony in Taihedian, or ‘The Hall of Supreme Harmony’.

  Pillars of nanmu, the redwoods of China, held up the hall’s high roof, while the pillars of Chongzhen’s empire – men from the ministries and military – assembled below, mingling uncomfortably among swarms of eunuchs, whom they despised for the overwhelming collective power they now wielded; such was government, late Ming style. News filtering through the state’s administration predicted that it was going to be yet another very tough year. In the past twenty years, as many as 15 million out of China’s 100 million population had perished – from starvation, disease or disaster.

  Fate was closing in on the Emperor and all under heaven from several directions. Out of the sky and up from the ground, the forces of nature were conspiring against him. His reign witnessed the coldest period in the so-called mini ice age. Dry desert air from the north had kept the rains away for five years in succession. The Emperor’s name was irrevocably linked with the disaster, which was dubbed the Chongzhen Great Drought. In the south, the lower reaches of the Yellow River, once a landscape of neat paddies, had never recovered the loss of its protective dykes, which had been ruptured in the Jiajing earthquake of 1556. More than 400 major floods and changes of course came in its aftermath. No longer filling the granaries and tax coffers, the rice bowl became wild and marshy, the home of wild ducks. People starved, populations dwindled, unrest stirred. Peasants believed the mayhem reflected imperial incompetence.

  Also in February 1644, the rebel peasant Li Zicheng founded his Shun Dynasty in Xi’an, pronouncing himself king. His army headed for Beijing, aiming to overthrow the Ming from the inside. Just outside the Wall, in the north-east, the military muscle and statecraft of the Manchus, who had long eclipsed the fractured Mongols as the main danger to Ming sovereignty, threatened the same from the opposite direction. The two threats peaked at the same time, and both put the dynasty at risk.

  Before the Lunar New Year celebrations had concluded, on the thirteenth day, the Chongzhen Emperor spoke to his Minister of War. Five days later, Zhao Kaixin, present at the recent ceremonial gathering, was ordered to write out stern words of warning to the government officials, as spoken by the Lord of Heaven. What the Emperor said, which we have reason to believe is as word-perfect as a recording, shows the gravity of the situation. Knowing full well that his provincial armies were r
efusing to fight for him, he resorted to waging war with words, warning officials of the grave consequences for anyone who dared to conspire with the ‘goddamn’ rebels.

  DESCRIPTION: ‘Concerning “Goddamn” Outlaws Who Deceive the People’, a handwritten scroll propagating imperial orders, written by Zhao Kaixin and dated the eighteenth day of the first lunar month of the seventeenth year of the Chongzhen Emperor’s reign, or 25 February 1644; 157.5 centimetres by thirty-three centimetres

  SIGNIFICANCE: Last-ditch effort by the last Ming Emperor, Chongzhen, ordering that all government officials should resist Li Zicheng’s rebellion

  ORIGIN: Board of War, Beijing

  LOCATION: National Museum of China, Beijing

  It would take the rebels nine more weeks to reach Beijing, so we can regard this circular as being an early, long-distance shot. It was designed to be sent down a long chain of communication: from palace to ministry, from capital to provinces, and then to counties, prefectures and magistrates.

  After such a journey, can you imagine how these words were received?