The earliest of the great walls of China has mostly disappeared, washed away by a widow’s tears. Or at least that is how the wall’s demise was remembered by Chinese peasants. They should know a thing or two about the First Emperor’s Long Wall. They built it.
In the original version of the tale, the widow hasn’t yet been assigned a name. We know her simply as a woman who is “good at weeping.” Her husband has been drafted to work on the Long Wall. He is apparently not a man who is “good at working,” as he flees the work site, unable to bear the cruel conditions of life as a conscript laborer. When he returns, he’s beaten to death by his supervisor and buried inside the wall. His wife travels far in search of him. Upon learning his fate, she weeps for ten straight days, washing away the wall and revealing the bones of all the workers who had died during its construction.
* * *
Many years later, a Chinese monk reflected on the Long Wall: “For a myriad of miles,” he wrote, “they built it of men and of mud.” His recipe for the wall had only two ingredients, and the first was manpower. The Chinese would never forget how much labor went into their walls. The workers’ recollection of their conscription and relocation, their separation from their families, and the cruelty of their supervisors stretches across the nation’s collective memory like a scar. According to one legend, the First Emperor multiplied the number of suns so that night would never fall and allow his workers to rest. He is said to have ordered that anyone found napping during the wall’s construction should be buried inside it. “The Wall was built with cries of pain and sadness,” went one Chinese song. Poets lamented not only the plight of those constructing the wall but also of those on the home front who had to churn out clothes to supply the wall’s workers and defenders.
A fifth-century AD imperial adviser, well versed in history but apparently possessing little insight into the mind of the common Chinese worker, once made a lengthy case for new border walls. He concluded his argument on this note: “And because the men would understand the long-term advantages of a wall, they would work without complaining.” That was some wishful thinking. In all the folk culture that has come down to us, those workers viewed their great walls as testimony to imperial folly. Why suffer to construct something that will fall on its own? The Chinese worker, like the Mesopotamian, understood the impermanence of work. By the time the first Chinese great walls were being constructed, they’d already built countless lesser walls and seen them washed away or blown away or both. They had their own way of doing things, but the results were scarcely more durable than the mud brick of Mesopotamia. Chinese wall builders typically shoveled windblown silt, or loess, between great wooden frames, then tamped it down layer by layer until it became almost rock hard. Earthen walls such as these made for formidable obstacles—at least to an enemy who lacked the power of weeping—but never possessed the permanence of actual rock.
The myth of the weeping widow washing away the Long Wall was already widespread within two hundred years of the wall’s construction. Evidently, the wall had started breaking down long before that. Over the next fifteen hundred years, the Chinese had plenty of opportunities to watch tamped-earth walls disappear into the landscape. An official from the Jin dynasty (AD 1115–1234) once became so frustrated that he urged the court to abandon a wall before it was even finished. “What has begun is already being flattened by sandstorms,” he observed, “and bullying the people will simply exhaust them.” An adviser to the sixteenth-century Ming, whose subjects were constructing the latest in a long series of Chinese long walls, expressed similar pessimism: “Walls made of sandy earth could easily collapse,” he warned. Within a century, most of the Ming walls stood no higher than a man’s shoulder. Windblown sand had filled the moats as well.
* * *
The Long Wall, and its most famous successor, the Great Wall, had many ancestors. Walls played midwife to civilization in China, much as they had in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Insecurity came from the usual quarters, too; the mountains from which China’s rivers descended were home to highland barbarians who posed a frequent menace to the cultivators of the valleys, and in time, the barbarians of the steppes were even more menacing. Chinese farmers, just like their counterparts in Egypt and Mesopotamia, converted their capacity for labor into defenses that alleviated the need to remain on a perpetual war footing. Even Neolithic Chinese villagers dug ditches and erected walls around their communities. As the settlements expanded, these defenses grew to impressive dimensions. Third-millennium walls sometimes reached a width of eighty feet.
A breathtaking amount of labor went into the construction of even the earliest Chinese walls. Whole communities pitched in to tamp down layer upon layer of dirt into forms. When they were finished, they had created the germ of a city—a partnership of wall and community that lasted throughout Chinese history. Many centuries later, when they had developed writing, the Chinese would adopt the same symbol for both city and wall. Some centuries after that, they developed the belief that each city had a protective city god—the Cheng huang shen. The name literally means “god of the wall and moat.”
There is no evidence that the early Chinese resented the building of city walls, just as there is no evidence of such resentment among the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, or Greeks. Where the Chinese eventually distinguished themselves, however, was in the construction of massive border walls—the great walls—which inspired a resentment nearly as great as the monuments themselves. This was the sort of greatness that, to borrow a cliché, the Chinese weren’t exactly born to but had thrust upon them. The thrusting, in this instance, came from the Eurasian Steppe, where a new way of life emerged in the first millennium BC.
* * *
The steppe peoples distinguished themselves from earlier barbarians only in the style of their warfare and the mobility of their lifestyle, but the impact of those innovations was such that the entire map of Eurasian civilization was transformed. Nearly two thousand years elapsed between the first great invasions of the Scythians in the seventh century BC and the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century AD. During that period, the capacity of steppe peoples to wreak havoc upon Old World civilizations approached the apocalyptic. Vast empires channeled their energies and resources into walling off this threat, but the first to do so was China.
The Chinese had no interest in conquering the steppe. It was as unappealing to them as it was forbidden. They saw the lands to their north as dry, uninhabitable waste covered with towers of ice and snow. Frontier poets spoke of how the wind howled at night, cutting their faces “like a knife.” The wasteland to their west was even worse. Authors described it as a thundering abyss, a desert where nothing grew and where floating sands swallowed up animals, vehicles, and men. Geographers confirmed these accounts with their colorful descriptions of Mount Scorched and River Coldhot. They described lakes so hot that the water seemed to boil and sands so hot that birds dared not fly over them. The worst thing about these descriptions was how much truth was in them. Windstorms regularly deposit thick layers of dust in northern China. Even modern journalists have observed mules drowning in the sand. In 1920, an earthquake wiped out 90 percent of the population of Gansu. It was said that the soft soil rolled like waves on the sea.
The burning summers and bitterly cold winters of the lands beyond China did not beckon the builders of walled cities. Pastoralism, a way of life that depended on animals, always made for a better fit. The herds of the pastoralist could take native grasses that were indigestible to humans and convert them into meat and dairy, which provided perfectly edible fats, carbohydrates, and proteins, as well as water. The pastoralist could survive where the farmer could not, but only as long as he kept moving.
Steppe pastoralists roamed constantly in search of untapped pasture and seasonal warmth. They acknowledged no boundaries. Whatever the shortcomings of this lifestyle, its satisfaction was undeniable, for the nomads of the steppe remained for thousands of years stubbornly uninterested in urban development, even in those areas where rivers crossed the steppe, making city life feasible. Theirs was a practical way of life. Pastoral nomadism provided fully for all their needs and offered something else besides: the warriors of the steppe could be organized into the greatest armies on earth.
The rise of the steppe armies began with two prehistoric technological advancements, neither of which is well understood. These were the wheel, which allowed for the unprecedented mobility of a people who could pack all their belongings into wagons, and the chariot, which brought about the first great leap forward in battlefield mobility. Of the first development, which dates to the fourth millennium BC, we know relatively little. However, the second makes for rather interesting prehistory. Charioteers first streamed southward from the steppes in the early second millennium BC, when the steppe hadn’t yet been fully transformed by pastoral nomadism and was perhaps as settled as it would ever be. In those days, the homeland of the steppe charioteers was dotted with well-established villages that churned out chariots and weapons in large numbers. Almost every home contained a metallurgical oven. The migrations of the charioteers southward overwhelmed the cities of Central Asia as well as the mysterious civilization of the Indus Valley.
The manufacturing centers of the Bronze Age steppe never grew into cities. Instead, a revolution in warfare rendered the chariot, and the centers that manufactured them, vulnerable and obsolete. At some point, perhaps around 1000 BC, the erstwhile charioteers became adept at fighting from horseback. Scholars still speculate as to what brought about this change—possibly developments in the tack that makes horses more easily controlled or perhaps the invention of more compact bows that could be wielded from horseback. Either way, the effects were revolutionary. Cavalry had every advantage over charioteering. Compared to the clumsy chariot, a cavalry mount provided a faster, more maneuverable firing platform, capable of traveling longer distances and able to traverse rougher terrains. Cavalry dispensed with all the limitations of charioteering: broken wheels and axles, the need for manufacturing centers, the drain on scarce metals, and the necessity for two-man teams in which only one man fights while the other steers. The steppe warriors who entered history in the first millennium BC were therefore, without exception, equestrians.
The spread of cavalry effectively ended the burgeoning village life of the early steppe. All across the vast plains, a single style of life soon prevailed—mobile, horse based, and aggressive. The nomadic equestrians lived in great tents that they packed up and moved whenever the weather worsened or pastures became depleted. Although in some areas they might grow crops on a modest and temporary basis, they were far more efficient in their use of animals. They collected the dung for fuel, the flesh for meat, the hair for clothes, the bones for tools, and the milk for yogurt, cheese, and that infamous fermented beverage known as koumiss. They herded and hunted on horseback, and during wartime, they each gathered several horses to serve as remounts, then formed into massive, self-sustaining forces that could campaign over vast reaches.
From time to time, a charismatic leader would forge the men of several steppe tribes into a horde. It was as close as the premodern world ever came to the atom bomb. These larger armies necessitated rapid, predatory campaigning. Horde formation upset the natural order of pastoralism, in which herds dispersed so that animals didn’t compete for pasture. A horde concentrated hundreds of thousands or even millions of animals into a single, massive pasture-devouring entity that had to move constantly to find feed. Unlike civilized militaries, which were tethered to their homelands by supply chains limiting their reach, the horde had no option except to campaign ever farther from its homeland. Moreover, the horde had to travel at a far faster clip than that maintained in peaceful pasturing movements. Killing was a necessity, too: the longer the horsemen campaigned, the more horses died and had to be replaced by seizing the livestock of settled peoples.
By the middle of the first millennium BC, the steppe north of China had given rise to the Hsiung-nu, a nomadic nation of warriors who fought from horseback. The more common English term for Hsiung-nu is Hun.
There may have been fifty times as many Chinese as Huns, but numbers brought the Chinese neither comfort nor security. Hun warriors terrorized the Chinese. Hun chieftains built their status on the economic exploitation of Chinese leaders, who would pay them all manner of tribute in the hopes of being left alone. The Chinese, meanwhile, developed an extensive vocabulary to describe the various sorts of attacks they suffered at the hands of nomads. Autumn was an especially dreadful time for the Chinese—the season of raiding, when nomads would appear from nowhere to strike at workers exposed in the fields.
* * *
A delightfully jaunty folk song recalls an early Chinese campaign against the barbarians of the steppe. Almost in passing, it refers to a new feature of the landscape:
The King had thus charged Nan-Chung:
“Go and build me a frontier wall.”
So rattled our cars along
Our war-flags fluttering all.
The royal command had we
To wall and defend the north;
And dread was Nan-Chung to see
As he swept the Hîn-Yuns forth.
At first when we took the track
The millets were all in bud;
And now for the journey back
’Tis snowing and all is mud.
O hard for the King we’ve slaved,
And often for home we craved
Here, then, is the birth announcement of the first Chinese border wall. Already the familiar themes are present: the defensive posture, the exhaustion and homesickness, the dread of a monarch who has drafted the men for a thankless task. The campaign and perhaps the song, too, date to around 800 BC. Hardly a word of the lyric would need to be changed over the next twenty-five hundred years.
Nothing more is known of Nan-Chung’s wall. Perhaps it kept the barbarians out for a while. At the very least, it seems to have set a precedent. During China’s Warring States period (471–221 BC), border walls proliferated. Walls separated Chinese from Chinese as well as from Huns and other barbarians. Several kingdoms built walls over three hundred miles long. The new fortifications were on a scale the world had never seen, dwarfing even the defenses Nebuchadnezzar had built for Babylonia. Yet they were but a prelude to the immense works of the First Emperor.
* * *
The First Emperor, as he was known, cut quite a swath through history. Robert Ripley, writing more than two thousand years later and with no special concern for accuracy, even maintained that you could see that swath from the moon. He was wrong about that. You can’t even see much of it from earth. The First Emperor’s Long Wall survives only in fragments, and even these have been eaten away by erosion and overgrown with weeds. It was not, as Ripley believed, the Great Wall, which also can’t be seen from the moon.
A brief entry on the Long Wall might read as follows: Having ruthlessly put down his domestic rivals, the First Emperor (r. 220–210 BC) turned to the problem of the steppe. Employing barbarian mercenaries, he campaigned into the lands slightly north of the preexisting Warring States walls. There, in those profitless regions that had never been coveted by the Chinese but that made strategic sense as a site for a defensible boundary, he established a fortified border for the state of China.
Nothing in this description seems, on the face of it, implausible. It would appear merely that the First Emperor, commanding more workers than soldiers, elected to overwhelm with productivity that which he could not defeat militarily. This would be a reasonable account of a reasonable strategy, and it would almost certainly be true—if only the First Emperor were known to be a reasonable man.
Historians—and most especially that tiny subset of researchers who occasionally opine on the subject of walls—are fond of applying a peculiar form of Occam’s razor to the past. That which does not make sense to them, they deny. Thus, for example, if Hadrian’s Wall seems to them poorly designed for defense, then they conclude, in defiance of explicit statements by ancient authorities, that it couldn’t possibly have been intended for defensive purposes. Likewise, if defensive policies seem generally incompatible with their vision of empire, then they characterize all imperial walls as acts of aggression, even when the wall-building empires have left behind mountains of evidence indicating they were terrified of the world beyond their walls. As for the possibility that superstition, religion, or the emotional state of some despot might have played a role in decision making, this is dismissed. It is the latter error that concerns us now. There is little to be gained from rationalizing an irrational past. The irrational played a great part in the antiquity of every nation. It frequently influenced the thinking of that select fraternity of kings who constructed great walls.
An ancient story provides a much less reasonable justification for the First Emperor’s wall than we have offered above. It is said that he ordered it constructed after hearing a prophecy that his kingdom would be destroyed by northern barbarians. This is the sort of inconvenient fact that we commonly report only in passing, a quaint story that gets in the way of our analysis. Who would believe it? The greatest enterprise of the ancient world undertaken on the prompting of some soothsayer? A project that consumed countless lives inspired by superstition? It seems superfluous to add that the emperor misunderstood his oracle and that it actually referred to his son, Hu, whose name was the same as a Chinese term for barbarian.
Almost everything we know about the First Emperor adds credence to the possibility that an entire nation was once put to work on an irrational whim. Like Nebuchadnezzar a lavish builder, the First Emperor had fantastic ambitions and a transparent contempt for those laborers who enabled him to realize them. At his Chinese Babylon, he had bells and statues made from the melted-down weapons of the armies he had defeated. Outside his palace, he constructed a sort of Disneyland of the Damned, where his legions of workers reproduced the palaces of vanquished kings. Each palace featured entertainments provided by captured musicians and dancers.
Megalomania gave rise to a consuming interest in the supernatural. The First Emperor surrounded himself with wizards and soothsayers. When a court magician suggested to him that he separate himself from his subjects, he resolved that none of them should ever see him again or even know where he was sleeping. He constructed 270 palaces near the capital, all connected by walled roadways that allowed him to move secretly from one palace to another, keeping one step ahead of assassins. Immortality became his obsession.
The First Emperor waged a private war against that same impermanence that the builders of his palaces and walls took for granted. He consulted prophets and alchemists and sponsored overseas expeditions in search of an elixir of life. To extend his life he drank poisonous concoctions of wine, honey, and mercury. Eventually, he took solace in the hope of a life after death. He ordered the construction of a massive, booby-trapped tomb, stocked with armies of terra-cotta soldiers and concubines. Rivers of mercury circulated around his tomb, which even today shows high concentrations of the element in the soil. He was not, the founder of China, a rational man.
The First Emperor brooded also on the immortality of his kingdom, and toward that end, rationally or irrationally, he built the Long Wall. These fortifications, the first built for the defense of all of China, would gradually come to define the nation. Built by soldiers, prisoners, vagabonds, and anyone else who could be pressed into service, the Long Wall stretched some 1,775 kilometers (1,100 miles) by conservative estimate, 3,100 kilometers (1,900 miles), or even 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) by more generous measures. Reputedly tireless, the First Emperor expected similar endurance from his builders. The workers shoveled and pounded earth across mountains and plains. In some areas, they toted tons of yellow loess up the mountainsides; in others, they bullied stone into place or made bricks. Where there was bedrock, they carved trenches and laid deep foundations. All the while, they were lucky to receive any supplies. According to one report, out of 182 loads of rice sent to the workers, only one finally arrived, such being the danger of their forward position.
Meng Tian, the general who supervised the construction of the Long Wall, later grieved that, in carrying out the project, he had “cut the veins of the earth.” The thought made him suicidal. As for those who had followed his orders to exhaustion, they were relocated to one of the forty-four newly built walled cities, whose job of guarding the borders amounted to, in the words of China’s Grand Historian, a life sentence. Many workers were force to toil away in the arid Ordos, a desolate loop in the Yellow River where the First Emperor established cities that were inevitably buried by sand dunes. A million or more hands participated in the construction of the Long Wall, and a million colonists were required to maintain it and supply the soldiers stationed there. Thus began a near two-thousand-year obligation to support China’s massive defenses against the steppes.
When it was all done, the First Emperor memorialized his achievement with a monument that reads much like the commemoration of Shulgi’s Wall of the Land in Mesopotamia. The people, he wrote, “enjoy calm and repose; arms are no longer necessary and each is tranquil in his dwelling. The Sovereign Emperor has pacified in turns the four ends of the earth.” By then, Shulgi’s wall was nearly two thousand years old, and tranquillity had settled permanently on the uninhabited ruins of Ur.
* * *
Chinese tradition turned more and more negative toward the First Emperor after his death. Each succeeding generation embroidered his legend with new myths to illustrate his tyrannical character. Historians ridiculed his appearance and his birth. They described him as stingy, cringing, and without grace. Perhaps their attacks amounted to nothing more than revenge for the First Emperor’s having burned the books of history and buried alive any scholars who continued to discuss them. But as if this were not enough, they were also convinced that the Long Wall had been for nothing.
The Long Wall did not solve the problem of the Huns. Perhaps it was simply not long enough. If anything, the attacks worsened. Struggling to maintain their way of life in the face of implacable Hun aggression, the Chinese soon fell prey to pessimism and concluded that all offensive operations against steppe peoples would end in futility. A second-century BC scholar criticized his emperor for attacking the Huns. A nation too fond of fighting, he insisted, will perish, as all military endeavors are ultimately regretted. He reminded the emperor of earlier campaigns where untold numbers of soldiers fought in wastes and wildernesses while the rest of China toiled to exhaustion to supply them. The roads were filled with the dying.
One imperial adviser after another preached the hopelessness of retaliating against the horsemen of the steppe. “If we send parties of lightly equipped soldiers deep into their territory,” wrote one imperial adviser, “our men will soon run out of food, and if we try to send provisions after them, the baggage train will never reach them in time.” Like other civilized peoples, the Chinese glumly concluded that the barbarians were simply superior to their own soldiers. “They can withstand the wind and rain, fatigue, hunger, and thirst,” wrote one official in 169 BC. “Chinese soldiers are not so good.” The Huns, he added, could even shoot arrows while riding over dangerous, sloping terrain. Another adviser wrote that the Huns swarmed like beasts and dispersed like birds: “Trying to catch them is like grabbing at a shadow.”
Emperors occasionally attempted to fight back against the raiders, but such efforts generally bore out the pessimistic predictions of the Cassandras in their cabinets. As often as not these campaigns ended in disaster. In 200 BC, an emperor’s troops blundered into the steppe during winter, and a quarter of his soldiers lost fingers to frostbite—no small loss for an army of crossbowmen. Similarly, a late second-century BC campaign provoked the Huns to launch raids of such severity that the cost of sending Chinese armies to chase them back all but exhausted the empire.
Eventually, the emperors settled on two strategies for defending the people within the country’s borders. Neither came particularly cheap, but such were the costs of trying to establish civilization in full view of the steppe. The first strategy was to buy off the barbarians. This became known as the “peace and friendship” policy and consisted of appeasing the Huns with annual gifts of silk, wine, grain, and food. Occasionally, the Chinese would rebrand this scheme to preserve the myth of imperial dominance. They insisted that neighboring barbarians become tributary states—an odd way of describing a situation in which the Chinese themselves forked over the tribute.
A human face is attached to China’s appeasement of the Huns. Alongside the vast bribes of money and commodities were added Chinese princesses, packed up and shipped off to barbarian chieftains, their freedom sacrificed for the security of their country. They became the tragic figures of Chinese poetry, whose verses depicted them leaving never to return:
Full in her face, the desert sand;
Full in her hair the wind
Her penciled brows have lost their black,
The rouge has melted from her cheek.
The princess Wang Zhaojun, bartered to the Huns in 33 BC, became a beloved character in Chinese folklore. In second-century songs, she is the symbol of Chinese civilization itself; she commits suicide after her son informs her he would rather be Hun than Chinese. Hundreds of poems and plays eventually centered on her apocryphal stand against barbarism.
The emperors never fully abandoned their strategy of appeasement. Generations of Chinese silk workers, farmers, tailors, and goldsmiths toiled away only to see the fruits of their labor handed over to bullies. Money that might otherwise have been used to patronize art, literature, theater, or architecture was siphoned away and melted down for the crude bling of the barbarians.
The alternative to outright bribery—border walls—came no less cheaply. It was, like appeasement, the strategy of a people who would rather work than fight, continuously forced on them by those who would rather fight than work. Since at least 10,000 BC, the world had been gradually sorting itself into two camps: those who lived behind walls and those who roamed freely outside them. The builders and the barbarians were implacably opposed, representing not just two sides of every wall but two sides of a revolution in human society. It was, in many ways, the seminal moment in the history of civilization, but we can only understand it by examining the lives of those who had no part of it. We turn next to the world of those who built no walls at all.