File:THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA.jpg

English: John Thomson: MY readers doubtless share with me in feeling that no illustrated work on China would be worthy of its name if it did not contain a picture of some portion of the Great Wall. This wall is an object neither picturesque nor striking. Viewing it simply as a wall, we find its masonry often defective, and it is not so solid or honestly constructed as one at first sight would imagine. It is only in the best parts that it has been faced with stone, or rather, that it consists of two retaining walls of stone, and a mound of earth within. In other places it is faced with brick, and there are again some other parts, of the highest antiquity, as is supposed, where we find it to consist of an earthen mound alone. Not a few travellers regard this wall as the greatest monument of misdirected human labour to be met with in the whole world, and those who have no sympathy with the modern scientific theories regarding the great pyramids, would make these no exception to this view. But I think that the Chinese can claim something more for their wall than the Egyptians can for their pyramids. The wall was built to save the country from the raids of the nomadic northern hordes, and this object it actually attained, more especially when the country was under a stable government. Thus Genghis Khan himself was repulsed before the inner wall. The erection of the Great Wall, which has a length of 1,500 miles, was the last great work of the Emperor Tsin-shehwang, b.c. 213. This monarch has been called the Napoleon of China, and he is said to have carried out other famous and probably more useful enterprises during his reign, erecting public buildings, cutting canals, and making roads, undertakings of a kind much needed in China at the present day. He too it is who has the memorable fame of having attempted to destroy all the ancient records of the Empire.

The Great Wall seems to me to express a national characteristic of the Chinese race. All along that people loved to dwell in their own land in seclusion, pursuing the industries and the arts of peace, and to them China has ever been the central flowery land. Within it everything worth having is concentrated, and outside of it, on narrow and unproductive soils, dwell scattered tribes of barbarians ever bent on predatory excursions into the paradise of the Celestial Empire. These outer barbarians, among which we ourselves are still secretly included, have always been an endless source of trouble, now beyond the wall on the north, now along the coast on the south and east, and at other times in the mountain regions to the west.

This view was taken from the north of the inner wall, at a place called Pata-ling. The inner wall stretches across the northern end of the Nankow Pass, and climbs in many places almost inaccessible steeps. It has been repaired at different periods, and was built originally about a.d. 542, when the Emperor Woo-ting of the Wei dynasty was on the throne. It is about 500 miles in length, and at its extremities joins on to the older outer wall. The granite and limestone with which it is faced abound in the rocks of the Pass. It is furnished with square watch-towers, at short distances apart, in the passes, and at longer distances in less accessible regions. In the background of the view (No. 56) we see one of the many inner spurs of this wall sweeping across the Pass. When emerging from the gateway seen on the right, one cannot fail to be impressed, with the massiveness and apparent strength of the structure.

The height of the wall is over thirty feet, and it is about fourteen feet broad on the top.

To venture upon any further description of this ancient barrier would only be to repeat an oft-told story with which my reader is, perhaps, already well acquainted. I will conclude, therefore, by expressing the hope that the work will convey a faithful impression of the places over which my journeys extended, and of the people as I

found them, so that my five years' labour may not have been in vain.