China says it now believes the Great Wall is longer than previously estimated.

A retired Chinese cultural heritage official said he found what "had to be part of the Great Wall of China” in Haizigou, north of Beijing. (Zhang Lingmian)
 

By Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

July 17, 2012, 9:02 p.m.

 

HAIZIGOU, China — Zhang Lingmian was collecting walnuts in the countryside north of Beijing last autumn when a friend from a nearby village mentioned a mysterious structure in the mountains that had stumped locals.

The retired cultural heritage official and his friend scampered uphill for two hours, whacking their way through the brambles after the path ran out. At the top of a 2,700-foot-high ridge, they reached a long trail of haphazardly placed rocks.

Zhang says he immediately recognized what villagers called "the strange stones."

"I knew right away it had to be part of the Great Wall of China," Zhang recalled on a recent hike to show off his discovery, about 50 miles from central Beijing.
 
 
만리장성의 위용!. 중국인들은 달에서 지구를 보면 유일하게 육안으로 보이는 것이 만리장성이라고 구라를 치고 있다. 만리장성이 규모가 큰 것은 부정할 순 없지만 그 말은 사실이 아니다. 믿어선 안 된다. 더군다나 만리장성의 동쪽 끝이 한반도에 있었다면서 엿가락 늘이듯이 길게 끌어다 놓으면서 역사를 왜곡하고 있는 사실도 잊지 말아야 한다.

Although most of the rocks had tumbled down, a few piles reached up to Zhang's chest. "The walls just had to be high enough to keep the barbarians from crossing with their horses," explained Zhang, who says he has been studying the wall for 33 years.

The Great Wall of China may be one of the most recognizable structures on Earth, but it is still in the process of revealing new layers of itself — to cries of disbelief and fury in some quarters. At a time when Beijing is asserting its territorial borders in the South China Sea, the discoveries are not universally applauded.

In early June, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage announced that it now believes the Great Wall is a stunning 13,171 miles long, if you put all of the discovered portions end to end. That's more than half the circumference of the globe, four times the span of the United States coast to coast and nearly 2 1/2 times the estimated length in a preliminary report released in 2009, two years into a project that saw the Chinese measure it for the first time.

To the extent that the Great Wall is a symbol of China, a bigger wall means, well, a bigger China, if only symbolically.

"I'm very suspicious. China wants to rewrite history to make sure history conforms with the borders of today's China," said Stephane Mot, a former French diplomat and a blogger based in Seoul, who has accused the Chinese archaeologists of obliterating Korean culture.

Traditionally, the Great Wall was thought to extend from Jiayuguan, a desert oasis 1,000 miles west of Beijing, to Shanhaiguan, 190 miles east of the capital, on the Bohai Sea. In 2001, Chinese archaeologists announced that the wall extended deep into Xinjiang, the northwestern region claimed by the minority Uighurs as their homeland. Last month's announcement brought the eastern bounds of the wall to the North Korean border.

That has outraged Koreans, who say the relics were built by ancient Koreans of the Koguryo kingdom, which occupied much of modern-day Manchuria from 37 BC to AD 688.

"This is a distortion. The Chinese are using the wall to wipe out the Korean legacy, the same as they are doing with the Uighurs and Tibetans," said Seo Sang-mun, a military historian with Seoul-based Chung-Ang University.

Chinese defend the new measurements.

"I would say that these are not necessarily 'new discoveries.' Rather, we are looking more carefully at what is on the ground and trying to clarify whether it is the Great Wall or not," Yan Jianmin, office director of the China Great Wall Society, a nongovernmental organization of scholars and wall enthusiasts.

The survey of the Great Wall's length involved thousands of people, with 15 provinces and regions submitting the results of their research to Beijing. In all, the State Administration certified 43,721 known sites of Great Wall remains, up from 18,344 before the survey. (Portions of the list were published on the agency's website, although it did not include the locations in Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces that are contested by the Koreans. Maps will not be released because they are considered a state secret.)

The difficulty is in defining what is "the Great Wall" and what is merely, well, an old wall.

What most people recognize as the Great Wall is the crenelated brick wall with watch towers and archer slits, the symbol of China from countless postcards and guide books. But there are many older walls dating from the 7th century that served the common purpose of defending China from invasion from the north.

The late Luo Zhewen, who was considered the top Chinese authority on the subject, once wrote that nothing should be considered the Great Wall unless it was at least 30 miles long, clearly defensive in nature and not circular, as opposed to a wall to keep your sheep from wandering.

 

Others have argued for more inclusive definitions.

"There is no consensus about what is Great Wall," said David Spindler, an American who is considered a leading expert on the subject. He has found a number of previously unrecognized segments, in part by poring over Ming dynasty texts, and he believes that more will be discovered.

The profusion of walls, some overlapping or running parallel, reflects history's changing boundaries and allegiances, although the constant in the geopolitical equation was the threat from Mongol invaders to the north.

"The term 'Great Wall of China' now has broader implications. Certainly over the years, people have realized it's not just the tourist wall … there are many walls," said William Lindesay, a British wall explorer who discovered a stretch in Mongolia last fall. "In ancient times, borders were not absolute. There were vast tracts of contested land, and the history of those ancient conflicts can still be found in the most remote places."

Satellite imagery has made it easier to see previously unrecognized indentations and depressions in the earth that have turned out to be remains of the Great Wall. Shifting desert sands, falling water levels in lakes and reservoirs also have exposed once-concealed remains.

In Shaanxi province, less than 20% of the wall remains had been discovered before the recent survey, said Li Gong, who headed the effort for the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology in Xian, the provincial capital.

The Chinese government did not include in its list locations outside the current borders of China. There are believed to be remains near the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, and Siberia, Russia. In February, Lindesay, the British researcher, released the results of an exploration last year in which he discovered a 62-mile-long stretch made of tamped earth and shrubbery in a closed military area north of the Chinese border in Mongolia.

Lindesay said he first learned about the section of the wall from a 12th century book about Genghis Khan's military campaigns. It was marked as the "Genghis Khan Wall" on maps, a dark line slivering through the Gobi desert supposedly built by the great Mongol conqueror to fence in herds of gazelle. But Lindesay concluded it was probably built by the Western Xia, a dynasty that ruled parts of northwestern China for two centuries until its conquest by the Mongols in the 13th century.

Although the discovery was widely publicized elsewhere in the world, barely a word has appeared in Mongolia, where anti-Chinese sentiments are rife.

Jack Weatherford, a leading Mongolia expert, wrote in an email from that country's capital, Ulan Bator, "There has been little reaction here in Mongolia to the 'Great Wall' other than to be slightly suspicious as to why people are discussing it and why they are calling it 'the Great Wall.'"