Ancient Chinese History

The Great Wall
In size, materials, and human labor, the Great Wall of China is the largest construction project ever undertaken by man. Enough stone was used in the 1,700-year project to build an 8-foot wall girdling the globe at the equator. The Great Wall snakes its way over more than one-twentieth of the earth's circumference.

In 1987, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) placed the Great Wall of China on its list of the world’s great national and historical sites.

During its construction, the Great Wall was called “the longest cemetery on earth” because so many people died building it. Reportedly, it cost the lives of more than one million people.

The most visited section of the Great Wall is in Badaling, close to Beijing, which was built during the Ming Dynasty. It was the first section of the wall to open to tourists in 1957, and was the finish site of a cycling course in the 2008 Summer Olympics.

The earliest extensive walls were built by Qin Shi Huang (260-210 B.C.) of the Qin Dynasty, who first unified China and is most famous for the standing terra cotta army left to guard his tomb. It is from the Qin (pronounced “chin”) dynasty which the modern word “China” is derived. Little of those earliest walls remain.

It is common to hear that the mortar used to bind the stones was made from human bones or that men are buried within the Great Wall to make it stronger. However, the mortar was actually made from rice flour—and no bones, human or otherwise, have ever been found in any of the Great Wall's walls.

The men who served as guards along the Great Wall of China in the Middle Ages were often born on the wall, grew up there, married there, died there, and were buried within it. Many of these guards never left the wall in their entire lives.

President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 increased tourism to the Great Wall. With increased tourism, sections of the Wall were restored, and after Mao Zedong’s death, the Chinese government recognized the Wall as a unifying symbol of the nation.
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Ancient History
China is the world's oldest continuous civilization, with a succession of ruling dynasties going back 4,000 years. The Chinese people can literally trace their history back to the Bronze Age--before Rome, before Greece, before King Tut ruled briefly in Egypt. When China got started, Europeans were still stacking rocks at Stonehenge.

Beijing got its start some 3,000 years ago as a frontier trading post. The first capital city at the site, called Chi, arose not too many centuries later. For the next 1,500 years, the city (which was called by various names) grew in size and importance, though it was destroyed and rebuilt several times and periodically fell to invading nomads from the north.

During the 13th century, Chinese rulers came under increasing pressure from the Mongols, a nomadic northern tribe led by the fearsome Genghis Khan, who destroyed an incarnation of Beijing in 1215. By the time Kublai Khan took over for granddad Genghis, the Mongols controlled most of northern China.

Kublai pushed south, conquering China and establishing the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). For his capital, he rebuilt the city Genghis had destroyed and renamed it Dadu, or "Great Capital." The city now known as Beijing became the political center of China--and youth hostel for one Marco Polo, who called Kublai "the greatest lord the world has ever known."

Mings

In the 14th century, secret peasant societies began to spring up in response to harsh Mongol taxation and confiscation of land. One of these societies, the "Red Turbans," drove the Mongols from China under the leadership of a peasant named Zhu Yuanzhang, who proclaimed the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and became known as the Hongwu emperor.

Under Hongwu and his immediate successor, Kublai Khan's capital city was renamed Beiping ("Northern Peace"), and for the next 35 years China's capital shifted south to Nanjing. The third Ming emperor, Yongle, moved the capital back to the north in 1403 and rebuilt the city, giving it its modern moniker: Beijing ("Northern Capital"). He also oversaw construction of the Forbidden City, an elaborate city-within-the-city at the heart of Beijing that served as the home of the Chinese emperor for five centuries. (The Forbidden City was actually doubly forbidden. It was surrounded by the Imperial City, a larger walled city-within-the-city that was also off-limits to the public. By the middle of the 17th century, as many as 25,000 people worked within its walls. But even these privileged few were not free to roam about in the even-more-forbidden Forbidden City.)

Of course, the Ming dynasty made great vases. But it also built sterner stuff, including most of the defensive walls along China's northern frontier, known collectively as the Great Wall. The Chinese had been building walls to keep out northern invaders since at least 200 BC, but the Great Wall that stands today is mainly Ming-made.

Unfortunately, the walls never really succeeded in keeping northern invaders out. Nor did isolationist prohibitions against travel abroad and foreign trade succeed in stopping Europeans--first the Portuguese, then the Spanish, English, and French--from establishing lucrative trading posts along China's coasts in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Manchus

By the early 17th century, the Ming dynasty was in trouble. A new enemy to the north--the Manchus--threatened, and the Ming emperors' ability to rule was clipped by a factious and corrupt bureaucracy, controlled primarily by eunuchs.

In 1644, rebelling peasants overthrew Beijing. The best Ming troops had been deployed to the Great Wall to guard against a Manchu attack. Yet when faced with Beijing's fall, the Ming commander made a deal with the Manchus to drive the rebel peasants out. The Manchus helped retake the city, but found they rather liked it. They made themselves rulers and established the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).

Unlike the Ming, who destroyed much of the old Mongol city and built their own, the Qing left the city pretty much as they found it. They adopted most of the Ming's political organization and generally left Chinese cultural traditions and institutions alone (except that they forced Chinese men to wear their hair in braids down their backs). They were wise enough, however, to purge the bureaucracy of its corrupt civil servants and to replace them with relatively more honest academics. Chinese scholars flocked to Beijing, and the city has remained the center of Chinese learning ever since.

Over time, the Qing established unprecedented levels of order, peace, and prosperity in China. In fact, the dynasty's advances in engineering methods prevented devastating floods in the countryside that had regularly killed millions of people before. Yet by the mid-19th century, the Qing began to falter, partly as a result of population growth driven by the very peace and prosperity that Qing rulers had brought to China.

European, and later American, powers also began to exert influence, determined to open China to trade (even if, in the case of Britain, that meant pushing opium).

Soon, European powers forced China into a series of disadvantageous treaties and trade agreements. The Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 ceded Hong Kong to Great Britain and opened five other Chinese ports to British trade and residence. The 1858 Treaty of Tianjin opened up ten more ports and allowed European travelers and missionaries into China's interior. By the end of the century, the Europeans seemed poised to divide up China among themselves. The humiliation of this interference remains at least part of the reason China's leaders resent western "interference" today.

Mao

As the Qing dynasty deteriorated, reform movements sprang up across China. Finally, in 1911, a loose coalition of revolutionaries overthrew the last Qing emperor and proclaimed a western-style republic. For several years after, the country was torn apart by warlords, civil war, and Japanese invasions. It was a republic in name alone.

From 1928 to 1937, Chiang Kai-shek, a young Nationalist Party general, ruled China from Nanjing. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party grew in strength by mobilizing peasant forces in the countryside. In 1934, Chiang's forces attempted to destroy the communists, driving them north in what became known as the Long March. Only 8,000 of the 80,000 communists who started the march survived Chiang's extermination campaign.

The survivors, including the young leader Mao Zedong, became heroes in Chinese communist lore. By 1949, the communists had seized power under Mao. Chiang Kai-shek and his forces sought refuge on the island of Taiwan, where, until his death in 1975, Chiang continued to claim that his was the legitimate government of all China.

When Mao and his forces established the People's Republic, they made Beijing their capital and rebuilt the city yet again. Blocks of buildings were razed to widen major thoroughfares. Soviet engineers removed several of the city's outer walls to improve the traffic patterns.

Cosmetic adjustments, however, were the least of the changes. Mao launched several attempts to overhaul China's economy, including a bloody process of land redistribution in which tens of thousands of landlords were killed. Untold numbers of peasants perished, too, in famines resulting from Mao's reforms.

Money

After Mao's death in 1976, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, sought to relieve the nation's staggering poverty with economic reforms, which included dismantling the agricultural communes established under Mao and building new factories. "To get rich," said Deng, "is glorious."

Deng's successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, have continued to liberalize China's economic policy while endeavoring to maintain the party's iron grip on power. Just look at pictures of today's China, or at the country's whopping 8 to 10 percent annual economic growth rate, and you can see that, right now, the Communist Party is having one heck of a capitalist party.