The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC - AD 2000

The history of the Middle Kingdom often presents China as a generally single entity unified against the barbarians. While this image is easy to believe at a superficial level, it glosses over three thousand years of cultural development and adaptation together with dynastic change. 'The Great Wall' presents the reader with 3,000 years of Chinese history from a different perspective. In the same way that there has not always been a unified China, there is not a single 'Great' wall. The walls are both symbolic and actual indicators of China's sense of self. This book provides a mixture of historical fact and interpretation in a style that I found both informative and entertaining. For those who want to pursue more detailed accounts, the select bibliography is very helpful. China is rapidly emerging as a world economic powerhouse. China's population is both a source of strength and of weakness. Highly recommended as a starting point for those who would like to know more about the history of this fascinating country. Jennifer Cameron-Smith

This book could serve an engaging text for a course in Chinese history. It describes the evolution of that great country tied to its most recognized symbol both as a construction and a thought. Lovell, a teacher of Chinese history and literature at Cambridge handles anecdotes as well as Tom Wolfe. Her prose is so engaging it cries out for colored maps showing different dynasties walls in different colors along with pictures of some of the individuals she describes. The great wall, which is a series of walls spread over a long distance, was intended to wall out the barbarians. Like the Maginot line it was not successful. The Great Wall did not keep Genghis Khan and his successors out. But it had an effect upon the Chinese psyche over much of that country's history. It is a metaphor for China's historical, social and economic isolation. That the Chinese thought themselves protected, but were walled in, is evident from the British trade mission launched in 1792. Evidently the British were running a trade deficit owing to enormous purchases of tea. George III sent diplomats with extensive gifts on a year long voyage to present their credentials to the Emperor. He received them with a great deal of reserve. Two weeks later the Emperor responded that his country had not "the slightest need of your country's manufacturers." What made the response even more insulting was that it was composed six weeks before the diplomats were shown in. Seventy years later, during the Opium War, the presents were discovered untouched in a stable. Lovell challenges the perceived singularity of Chinese culture by describing the various walls built from the Warring States period through the Ming dynasty, a period of over 1500 years and the cultural differences during those times. She also asserts that while the wall is long, it is mostly made of mud and not very great. Genghis and his hoard, and later the Manchu's, passed through it with relative ease, testifying to the statement attributed to Genghis that: "the strength of walls depends on the courage of those who guard them." Hundreds of miles long the wall is now mostly rubble, except, of course, for the tourist sections, such as that President Nixon visited. This is in contrast to the various Chinese city walls dating as early as the third millennium B.C. which are now being excavated. While the long wall is a symbol of the unity of China over millennia, that unity is mostly fiction. So is the assertion that it can be seen from the moon. The walls were built to bar the nomads, the barbarians and the hoards from the North. The Chinese were assumed to be on the defensive. However, while the walls existed, China colonized much of the area south of the Yangtze and the Tibetan plateau. As Lovell moves from the Shang to the present, she brings to life the builders and destroyers (including nature) of the wall and the economic causes of the ebb and flow of expansion and defense. She writes t

Julia Lovell adopts a unique perspective for viewing 3,000 years of Chinese history: its walls. While most can identify the tourist mecca of "The Great Wall," few realize that the contemporary tourist site is but a tiny, heavily restored and recently added part of a series of walls that China has been erected over an almost 2,500 year period. With one exception noted below, Lovell provides a singularly interesting view of Chinese history. She destroys many myths about China's walls and provides an enlightening perspective on how the walls may have reflected, if not shaped, China's attitudes toward the world. China's early history, Lovell reminds us, was turbulent. Not only were the tribes and states that would ultimately comprise modern China constantly warring with each other, but tribes to the north, east and west were regularly raiding these nascent states. Thus the first walls, intended to make it more difficult for the nomadic steppe tribes to ravage what is now northern China. They didn't work. Of course, failure didn't keep subsequent rulers from turning again and again to walls not only to keep invaders out, but to keep their own people in. Over generations, Sinocentricism was one result of the walls: the Chinese were superior to all and neither needed nor wanted intercourse with others except on their own carefully restricted rules. The walls restricted not only the flow of trade goods, but ideas and information as well. Lovell reviews the rise and fall of one dynasty after another. Her catalog of horrors seems endless with one exception: the rule of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party. It's a bit of a shock, frankly, to from one instance after another of brutal death and torture under this Emperor or that to a frighteningly placid description of Mao's China which was more repressive and murderous than any other, some 70 million allegedly dying under Mao's leadership. Further, Lovell repeatedly refers to Mao's Nationalist opposition as being "right-wing," as if that is a signal for something worse than Communist rule. Ms. Lovell might profit from a reading of "The Unknown Mao" or numerous other catalogs of the Maoist terror. Aside from that bit of possible political bias, Lovell's history is something of a masterpiece. You can't help but marvel at how successive Chinese reigns sacrificed enormous treasure and lives to build their walls, each of which was a failure in its turn. The impact of refusing entry with the help of those walls to goods and, more importantly, ideas had a stunning negative effect on the growth and well-being of the Chinese people. Lovell's treatment of the current Chinese regime and its "Great Internet Firewall" is thought-provoking. Overall, a marvelous read for anyone with an interest in history, current world events and the future, for the impact of the Chinese walls is still with us. Jerry

In this excellently written expanisve history of China the book brings us face to face with history and the unique monument of the Great Wall as a metaphor for that histor and the national culture of China. We learn here about the geographic conception of China and the nature of Chinese relations to outsiders from 1000BC to 2000AD, a vast subject, condensed into an understandable polemic. Just a wonderful work, Seth J. Frantzman

A young English scholar interprets much of Chinese history as a struggle between internationalism and isolationism, reflected in the repeated efforts to wall out invaders from the north. Frequently contrasting official rhetoric about the efficacy of the glorious walls with the reality of their constant failures and treasury-draining costs and occasional perspectives from common people, she surprises the reader with accounts of how European and Japanese incursions strengthened the idea of the Great Wall in the Chinese consciousness. By abbreviating specific incidents and omitting character portraits, Lovell successfully compresses almost 4000 years of history into a narrative with very few boring passages. But with so much time to cover, almost no room is left for comparisons with other civilizations. She does mention Israel's fence a couple of times; another interesting comparison would be with the US borders. Highly recommended as a source of insight into the folly of empire and insularity.