Qin Great Wall Construction
Qin Shi Huang ordered the northern walls joined together around 214 BC, and hundreds of thousands of people were sent to build it. The individual walls already existed. The warring states of Yan, Zhao and Qin had each built rammed-earth barriers against steppe raiders over the previous two centuries, and the first emperor's project was to link and extend them into a single line running some 5,000 kilometres. General Meng Tian was given 300,000 troops and an unknown number of conscripts and convicts. The construction was rammed earth rather than the stone and brick that tourists photograph — those sections are Ming, built some 1,600 years later, and follow a different line further south. The purpose is often misunderstood. It was not intended to stop an invasion by itself, since a determined army can breach or bypass any wall, but to stop raiding: horsemen could not cross it quickly with stolen cattle, and the garrisons, beacon towers and roads behind it turned a raid into a running fight. It also marked where the empire considered itself to end. The cost in life was enormous and is the part Chinese tradition remembers. The story of Meng Jiangnu, whose weeping for her husband buried in the wall brought a section of it down, has been told for two thousand years. The Qin dynasty fell within four years of the first emperor's death, in a rebellion whose grievances included exactly this kind of forced labour. It is also not visible from space with the naked eye, a claim that predates spaceflight by decades and has been contradicted by every astronaut asked. It is long and narrow and roughly the colour of the ground it runs across.
- Year: 214 BCE
- Category: Cultural
