The strength of a wall depends on the courage of those who d

Badaling Great Wall
Also known to the Chinese as the“10,000 Li Wall”,the Great Wall stretches from Shanhaiguan Pass on the east coast to Jiayuguan Pass in the Gobi Desert.Standard histories emphasise the unity of the wall.The
“original”wall was begun 2000 years ago during the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC),when China was unified under Emperor Qin Shihuang.Separate walls,constructed by independent kingdoms to keep out marauding nomads,were linked up.The effort required hundreds of thousands of workers,may of them political prisoners,and 10 years of hard labour under General Meng Tian.An estimated 180 million cubic metres of rammed earth was used to form the core of the original wall,and legend has it that one of the building materials used was the bodies of deceased workers.
The wall never really did perform its function as a defence line to keep invaders out.As Genghis Khan supposedly said,“The strength of a wall depends on the courage of those who defend it”.Sentries could be bribed.However,it did work very well as a kind of elevated highway,transporting men and equipment across mountainous terrain.Its beacon tower system,using smoke signals generated by burning wolves' dung,transmitted news of enemy movements quickly back to the capital.To the west was Jiayuguan Pass,and important link on the Silk Road,where there was a Customs post of sorts and where unwanted Chinese were ejected through the gates to face the terrifying wild west.
During the Ming Dynasty a determined dffort was made to rehash the project,this time facing the wall with bricks and stone slabs– some 60 million cubic metres of them.This Ming project took more than 100 years,and the costs in human effort and resources were phenomenal.
The wall was largely forgotten after that.Lengthy sections of it have reurned to dust.The wall might have disappeared entirely had it not been rescued by the tourist industry.Several important sections have recently been rebuilt,dressed up with souvenir shops,restaurants and amusement park rides.Oddly,the depiction of the wall as an object of great beauty is a bizarre one.It's often been a symbol of tyranny,as the Berlin Wall once was.
The majority of visitors see the Great Wall at Badaling,70 km north-west of Beijing at an elevation of 1000m.This section of the wall was restored in 1957,with the addition of guard rails.Since the 1980s,Badaling has become exceedingly crowded with visitors so a cable car was added to enhance the flow of tourist traffic.