It would be almost 200 years before Kangxi’s maps were ‘declassified’ to reach a wide viewership. In 1929, after the discovery of copper printing plates in the Manchu Imperial Palace, Shenyang, a reprint was published under a title that referred to the map’s secret history: Qing Neifu Yitong Yudi Mitu, ‘A Confidential Map of the Qing Empire’. Even then, some of its maps remained the best available.
This map of the Great Wall in ‘The Jesuit Atlas of Kangxi’s Realm’ represents its zenith, and nothing better follows. It would be 300 years exactly before the next survey was conducted, in 2007–08 by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage. It used GPS technology, and would prove very different to the Jesuit survey in one major respect. In 1708 the surveyors set out to learn what was there; in 2008 they discovered what had gone.
43.
In Great Detail
Captain Parish’s technical drawings
The qualities of these Great Wall images are best understood when you take them from the British Library in central London back to the foot of Crouching Tiger Mountain at Gubeikou, 120 kilometres north-east of Beijing. Doing so allows you to appreciate the journey made by their artist in 1793, and to examine the skill of his hand, the accuracy of his measurements and the discipline of his pen.
With scans of pages 158, 159 and 160 of Captain William Parish’s field notebook in hand, I set off from the library. A three-stage journey brings me to the Wall at Gubeikou: the Tube to Heathrow Airport, a direct flight to Beijing Capital Airport, and a drive up the Beijing-Chengde expressway and along the G101 trunk road, which passes right through the Wall in the centre of Gubeikou town.
With the Crouching Tiger to my west, I walk 100 metres to the edge of the Chao River. I take off my shoes, roll up my trousers and wade across to stand in front of the newly rebuilt ‘Sister Towers’, a unique arrangement of two watchtowers side by side. I turn away from them to the north, passing the hamlet of Xishuimen, and ascend a path that leads up to the section of Wall that lies parallel to the river. I pass through the first tower and continue to the next. I retrieve the scans from my backpack and read Captain Parish’s ‘remarks’, written in fountain pen, and then (eventually with the help of a ladder) I explore the three levels of ‘Tower No. 2’ with his cross-sections as my guide. Only seventeen hours have passed since I strode out of the British Library. In as many seconds, people all around the world will see the photographs I am taking of the tower.
Parish’s images originate from the late eighteenth century, a slower-paced time. He set sail on the HMS Lion in September 1792 as part of a British Embassy delegation to China, led by Earl George Macartney (1737–1806). The next summer they made North China landfall at Dagu (Taku) on the Bohai coast (near Qinhuangdao), then proceeded upriver to Tongzhou, in Beijing’s eastern suburbs, where they were accommodated near Yuanming Yuan (the Old Summer Palace). The British were not planning a cultural tour of the Great Wall; this was a serious business trip.
The British East India Company, which held a British government monopoly to trade with China, was frustrated by the restrictions imposed upon it (and on all foreign traders) by the ‘Cohung’ system, a monopolistic guild of merchants at the one and only trading port of Canton (Guangzhou). While British trade was booming worldwide, it had remained stagnant with China. Macartney’s mission was to negotiate a relaxation of the restrictive regulations.
The British arrived in Beijing in late summer, when the Qianlong Emperor was still residing at his mountain resort of Chengde, 250 kilometres north of the imperial capital. After stressing that an important aim of the mission was to convey birthday congratulations from King George III to the Qianlong Emperor, the embassy was granted permission to travel north in the last days of Beijing’s August heat. Two days out from the capital, the British had a chance encounter with the Great Wall at the fortifications at Gubeikou.
DESCRIPTION: Technical drawings of the Great Wall at Gubeikou by Captain William Parish of the Royal Artillery, a member of the British Embassy to China, 1793
SIGNIFICANCE: The earliest technical drawings and accurate landscape painting of the Wall
ORIGIN: Made in September 1793 at the foot of Wohu Shan, or Crouching Tiger Mountain, Gubeikou, Hebei-Beijing border
LOCATION: British Library, London (WD 961 158, WD 961 159)
A guard of honour, composed of an estimated 1200 soldiers – divided into companies, flying five banners and accompanied by trumpets and music – made the British feel welcome, and very important. Soon after, this first international tour group clambered over the nearby ramparts. Sir George Staunton, the embassy secretary, who would author the official account of the mission, conveyed the great scale of the Wall to his readership, estimating that if the entire Great Wall was dismantled and rebuilt at the equator at a standard three feet high and wide, it would circle the globe two and a half times. While ‘all the embassy went to visit it,’ Staunton wrote, ‘Captain Parish was particularly attentive to its construction and dimensions.’
Parish was an officer of the Royal Artillery, an architect and skilled draftsman. He used pencils, ruler, watercolours, ink pen and tape measure – and considerable time – to record meticulously the details of what he saw in front of him. The unique aspect of his work lay in the plans, cross-sections, elevations and views of the walled landscape of Crouching Tiger Mountain. Parish ignored what was purported to lie beyond, which was said to be so extensive that its volume was estimated to exceed that constituting Great Britain’s buildings; he decided instead to examine and record its fascinating minutiae.
It would be a further three years before Parish could share his work with the British public. On his return to London it was rearranged and presented as a series of copperplate engravings printed in a large-format supplementary volume to An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, written by Staunton and published in 1796. Parish’s view of the Wall snaking up the mountain at Gubeikou became the most widely published Great Wall image worldwide, and remained so for the next seventy years, until pioneering photographers began to show the diversity of the structure.
The British proceeded north to Chengde. Despite the failure of fifteen previous diplomatic trading missions to China – from Portugal, the Netherlands and Russia – the British were confident. Although King George III (1738–1820) reigned over a population of just 8 million British subjects, compared to the 330 million Chinese who lived in the Qianlong Emperor’s Great Qing Empire, Britain was the first industrial power to come knocking on China’s door. By the time of the Macartney Embassy, the British had already colonised land on all the world’s continents, and were set to add most of Australasia within decades. Now they were determined to monopolise trade with China, shutting out any opposition.
The meetings between the British and Chinese took place during the mid-autumn of 1793, in Manchurian yurts set up at Wanshou Yuan, or ‘Garden of 10 000 Trees’. Earl Macartney presented Great Britain’s requests: an envoy stationed in Beijing, the abolition of import and export duties, the opening of more ports to trade, and freedom for missionary work. Not only were these demands rejected, but Macartney was told that the Great Qing had no need at all for any British manufactures. Eventually, the British were deported. All in all, the encounter was an epic collision of cultural, diplomatic, economic and psychological sensitivities.
While the twilight years of Qianlong’s long reign marked the zenith of the so-called ‘High Qing’ period, a much larger empire was starting to emerge beyond its borders. When the Qing fell, in 1912, its Emperor ruled the largest ever China, at 14.7 million square kilometres. At the same time, the British controlled some 33 million square kilometres, giving rise to the saying that ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’.
In contrast to China’s traditional strength – centralisation around an ancient core – the British relied on the worldwide reach of their empire. Colonies produced raw materials, which were shipped to Britain’s factories
via a web of new shipping routes. In this way Britain produced a variety of goods for expanding urban markets.
For 2000 years Chinese refusals to trade on the northern frontier had aggravated the nomads of north-east Asia, leading them to attack and seize a share of China’s material wealth by force, undeterred by distance or difficulty. Nor did the great distances and the bolted trade door put off the British. Their heavily armed gunships would soon be a new form of cavalry on the seaboard horizon of south-eastern China, just as mobile, manoeuvrable and unstoppable as the Xiongnu horsemen had been 2000 years earlier.
Although it drew a blank, the Macartney Embassy may be seen as the opening shot of a war to break out on a new frontier. And while these peoples, their eras, their homelands, their transport and their weapons technologies were vastly different, the core issue remained the same: access to trade.
Oddly, it was quite by chance that the British, in travelling across the globe for trade talks with the Chinese Emperor, chanced upon the Great Wall. There, a certain Captain Parish took his unexpected opportunity to walk on the ruins, draw and measure, and give the world a detailed preview of its appearance. Ultimately, the reception the British received from the Emperor convinced them that although the Wall had been abandoned, a new wall stood strongly in his mind, and its purpose was to keep foreigners out.
44.
New Convoys
Photo of the Beijing to Paris inaugural car rally
From the distant origins of the Great Wall’s story to the latest media reports mentioning it, there is one ever-present issue: mobility. Without the robust Mongolian horse, northern nomads could not have crossed hundreds of kilometres of hostile terrain to China, in search of their material gains (see Object 25). And without the car, hundreds of thousands of Beijingers would lack the personal mobility that lets them escape the city’s foul air and seek respite in the municipality’s northern mountain suburbs.
After the grimmest of Beijing springs, which was plagued by weeks of dense smog, car owners in the capital made a mass exodus on the May Day state holiday in 2014, participating in what one local media source described as an ‘epic 55-kilometre-long tailback’. The jam clogged the Badaling Expressway, leading from the northern edge of Beijing to the most-visited section of tourist Great Wall.
‘Participate’ is a key word here. On 31 January 1907, Le Matin, a leading Parisian newspaper, solicited the participation of both car makers and adventurous motorists in an automobile ‘raid’, or expedition. ‘What needs to be proved today is that as long as a man has a car, he can do anything and go anywhere,’ the editors wrote. ‘Is there anyone who will undertake to travel this summer from Paris to Peking by automobile?’ they asked. Eleven men in five cars took up the challenge that summer, although they eventually drove in the opposite direction to exploit better weather.
At eight-thirty a.m. on 10 June, the participants assembled outside the gates of the Caserne Voyrun Barracks, the new French Legation in Beijing, hoping to drive all the way to Paris. The favourite among the starters was an Italian aristocrat, Prince Scorpione Borghese, driving his Turin-made Itala. He had arrived weeks in advance of his car in order to reconnoitre on horseback the initial section of the route through the mountains leading out of Beijing. Using a bamboo pole cut to the width of his car, he was out to ensure that his Itala could pass through some of the valleys’ narrowest defiles – and if it couldn’t, he hired workers to widen the track.
The legation’s arched entrance and protective walls were decorated with the French tricolour flag. A banner was draped across the street wishing the drivers ‘Bon Voyage’, while a military band trumpeted the French national anthem. Firecrackers were set off, the cars engines started, and, as one of several photogravures in L’Illustration shows, the vehicles disappeared under plumes of exhaust smoke.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, automobiles were relatively new, very dirty, mechanically unreliable and a largely untested means of long-distance transportation. They were uncommon, too, having only been used for twenty years or so, and their purchase was still largely the preserve of the wealthy. Ford, the first mass producer of motorcars to the American public, had only been founded in 1903. The world largest cities were seeking solutions to a transport pollution problem that was unimaginable to smaller town dwellers at the time: horse dung.
In China, roads were – and still are – called malu, or ‘horse roads’, for good reason. Horses (or anyone on foot, for that matter) made their way by picking a path step by step. This selective action makes part of the way, the chosen way, smoother, while those places perpetually avoided remained rougher. Wheels, on the other hand, have to maintain continuous contact with the ground and so wear down a more consistent surface. An image in L’Illustration shows the advantages that the traditional held over the new – camels and horses are seen overtaking cars that have been stopped on the track by potholes, stones or boulders. Automobiles were encumbered also by their need for gasoline, which, ironically, had to be carried in advance by camels along most of the rally’s Asian route.
DESCRIPTION: A photogravure print depicting cars and coolies in the lee of the Great Wall at Badaling, on the third day of the inaugural Peking to Paris ‘Expedition’ of 1907
SIGNIFICANCE: The first motorcars at the Great Wall; this mode of transport led to the transformation of the Chinese landscape in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and had an increasing impact on the remotest sections of Walls
ORIGIN: Double-page spread in a four-page report in the French magazine L’Illustration, published in Paris on 13 July 1907
LOCATION: Author’s collection, Beijing
Soon after leaving Nankou, on the second day, the motorists left the pan-flat North China Plain and entered the narrow Juyongguan, a nineteen-kilometre long valley which threads its way between steep mountains up to the Wall at Badaling. This ‘horse road’ proved completely impassable to the cars, as our object, a double-page photogravure in L’Illustration, reveals. Not only does it show the first motorcars at the Wall, but also the Wall’s first traffic jam. The caption read: ‘Cars in difficulties after passing the Great Wall of China. The road was a road only by courtesy and resembled rather a very rocky beach. Petrol was no longer any use: ropes were attached to the cars, and with these they were dragged along by teams of coolies.’
Remarkably, after sixty-one days and more than 14 000 kilometres, Prince Borghese rumbled into Paris more than a week ahead of the three other vehicles that remained. But had he really proved that cars could take anyone anywhere?
One hundred and eight years later, roads are smooth, flat and wide, and cars are no longer only toys for the wealthy. In Beijing, they have become common possessions for laobai xing, or ‘ordinary folk’. In 1907 there were only seven motorcars in Beijing; by 2014 there were an estimated 7 million.
Since 2000, the Chinese government has rolled out an unprecedented distance of top-quality roads, paving the way for this rocketing level of car ownership. Yet despite a century’s advancements in automobile engineering and roadbuilding, the epic May Day traffic jam showed what the promise of personal mobility to millions has actually provided: hundreds of thousands of vehicles lurching at a snail’s pace from the city to the Great Wall.
The situation illustrates what Canadian environmentalist Professor Ronald Wright terms a ‘progress trap’ – a situation that arises when technological innovation, often coupled with mass production, create conditions or problems that society is unable to foresee, or unwilling to solve. Traffic congestion in Beijing is now a daily event; a mass quest for personal mobility has led to mass immobility.
Would smoother, wider roads help, or faster cars? No, of course not. The real problem was the widespread belief that cars could provide a socially acceptable form of transport to the population of a mega-city like Beijing, which is thought to be approximately 20 million. Air-quality issues aside, another obvious alarming message of May Day 2014 was ‘roadspace’. As Bill For
d, the fifth-generation family boss of Ford, the world’s fifth-largest carmaker, acknowledges, countries with large urban populations will always suffer chronic gridlock when a lot of people take to the road at the same time, aiming to get to the same place.
The motorcar has left battle scars in many places along the route of the Wall, markers of neglect, ignorance and mismanagement. Before legislation was enacted to protect the Great Wall in 2007, hundreds of openings were punched through its ruins. Some widened already existing tracks of yesteryear, while others were new openings made by new government road-building programs . Rather conspicuously in 2005, the Ministry of Transport didn’t enter into consensus with other ministries and administrations pledging to make unified and more vigorous efforts to protect the Great Wall.
Decades in which the smashing of old structures was condoned in the name of revolution – which was rife from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s – created a culture of widespread acceptance. The ruins of the Ming Wall, fragmented yet stunning, an extensive outdoor museum that stretched across nine provincial administrative regions of North China, were particularly vulnerable. Especially where it appeared less spectacular than the grander, more famous sections near and around Beijing, it was seen as an old and useless relic standing in the way of modern progress.
What the Scottish environmental philosopher John Muir said about those who felled trees is equally applicable to those who knocked down the Great Wall: ‘Any fool can cut down trees; they can’t run away.’ In fact, I would argue that their foolhardiness was even greater, since the authenticity of the Great Wall’s ruins can never be recovered. At the time, an oft-quoted development maxim promoted the need for ‘more roads to pave the way to prosperity’: the present and the future were more important than the past.
Great Wall in 50 Objects Page 23
