6.Wall of China

Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is an ancient series of walls and fortifications located in northern China, built around 500 years ago. Estimates of its length vary from 1,500 to 5,000 miles, but an archaeological survey carried out in 2012 by China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage suggested the wall is more than double than that length: some 13,000 miles – or 21,000km – long

Why was the Great Wall of China built?

The Great Wall of China was built to protect China from its enemies and invaders from the North, especially the Mongols. The Mongols were a tribal group that would regularly conduct raids into China. ... All the walls were built for the purpose of military defense, and the Great Wall of China was no exception.

 

Five Rumours About "the greate wall"

      

1.It cannot be seen from the Moon

This statement was, of course, founded on no evidence at all, since it was made 30 years before anyone had been in space. Yet it became sanctioned by use. Even the eminent Sinologist Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilisation in China, stated that “the Wall has been considered the only work of man which could be picked out by Martian astronomers”. Though discredited by astronauts, the Moon version is still widely quoted as a “fact”. The truth was established once and for all during the first Chinese space flight in 2003, when astronaut Yang Liwei said he couldn’t see anything of it from orbit.

2.The Chinese don’t call the Wall ‘the Great Wall’

The Chinese term for the Wall emerges from a distant past – long before “the Great Wall” was used – when every city had its own wall. 
So fundamental was the connection between walls and cities that the Chinese used one word to cover them both, and they still do.

3.The Wall you know and love is not as old as you think

The Wall is widely thought to date back 2,000 years to just after 221 BC, when China was first unified. In fact, almost everything which is that old is no more than a mound of earth. The popular idea of the Wall derives from the stone, battlemented structure built by the Ming (1358–1644). Its maximum age is about 500 years.

4.There’s more than one Wall

The Wall is not an “it”. It’s a “them”, in the plural. 
They are in bits, and very few of them look like the glorious creation to which tourists go. Tame sections give way to wild ones – crumbling, overgrown, barred to walkers – and wild ones vanish into gaps made by roads and reservoirs. In many places, the Wall doubles, triples even quadruples itself. And all of these bits overlap each other in time. The sections you see around Beijing have ancient precedents, some of which run directly beneath the Wall. And these divided sections are as nothing compared to other walls of earth, which run westward in parallel lines and scattered segments.

5.It is not a wall

Well, the Ming bits around Beijing are, but out west, brick and stone give way to earth: sometimes moulded by the elements into camel’s humps; sometimes no more than a gentle bank; sometimes nothing at all. And there is much more to the Wall than walls or banks: fortresses, barracks, guard-towers and beacon-towers stalk the main lines of the Wall in a sort of stretched-out halo.

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