construction and history of the great wall of china

Construction and History of the Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is an ancient Chinese fortification built from the end of the 14th century until the beginning of the 17th century . It was during the Ming Dynasty that the great wall was built in to protect China from raids by the Mongols and Turkic tribes . It was preceded by numerous walls built since the 3rd century BC against the raids of nomadic tribes coming from areas now in modern day Mongolia and Manchuria . The Wall stretches over a formidable 6

,350 km (3 ,946 miles from Shanghai Pass on the Bohai Gulf in the east , at the limit between China proper and Manchuria , to Lop Nur in the southeastern portion of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region

The first major wall was built during the reign of the First Emperor the main emperor of the short-lived Qin dynasty . This wall was not constructed as a single attempt , but rather was created by the joining of numerous regional walls built by the Warring States . It was located much further north than the current Great Wall , and very little remains of it . A protective wall on the northern b was built and maintained by numerous dynasties at different times in Chinese history . The Great Wall that can still be seen nowadays was built during the Ming Dynasty on a much larger scale and with longer lasting materials like solid stone used for the sides and the top of the Wall than some wall that had been built before . The main purpose of the wall was not to keep out people , who could scale the wall , but to insure that semi-nomadic people on the outside of the wall could not cross with their horses or return easily with steal property

Furthermore , it was the government who ed people to work on the wall , and workers were under continuous danger of being attacked by brigands . Because various people died while building the wall , it has obtained the gruesome title "longest cemetery on Earth " or "the long graveyard . Their bodies were not entombed in the wall , nevertheless . A body buried in the wall would have weakened its structure , so workers were buried nearby instead . While several portions near tourist centers have been preserved and even reconstructed , in most locations the Wall is in bad condition , serving as a playground for some villages and a source of stones to reconstruct houses and roads . Sections of the Wall are as well prone to graffiti . Parts have been bulldozed for the reason that the Wall is in the way of construction projects . Moreover , the materials used are those accessible near the site of construction . Near Beijing the wall is constructed from quarried limestone blocks . In other locations it might be quarried granite or fired brick . Where such materials are use , two finished walls are erected with earth and rubble fill placed in between with a final paving to form a single unit . In various areas the...