Engineering the Great Wall of China

Engineering the Great Wall of China — page 1 — CHAPTER ONE 4

Engineering the Great Wall of China — page 2 — AN INCREDIBLE WALL The The guard stood watch on a tall tower above the wall He gazed toward the plains to the north Far in the distance he spotted invading horsemen They raced toward the wall The guard quickly lit a fire The smoke would be seen by soldiers posted farther along the wall They would grab their weapons and come quickly Together they would rally and protect China from its enemies The Great Wall of China is one of the largest building projects ever undertaken It runs across northern China for thousands The wall’s towers gave defenders a clear vantage point over the Chinese frontier 5

Engineering the Great Wall of China — page 3 — of miles It crosses mountains rivers and deserts on its way to the Bohai Sea on China’s eastern coast THE GREAT WALL The wall’s builders did not use the term Great Wall The old Chinese name for it was Changcheng That means long wall Some dynasties referred to their walls by various names such as border walls and frontier walls European and American visitors to China in the 1700s began referring to the wall as great They mistakenly thought that it was a single continuous wall They believed it had been built in the 200s BCE and survived intact for centuries What is now referred to as the Great Wall is actually a series of separate walls The walls were built and abandoned over a span of more than 2,000 years They were constructed at different times and for different reasons They followed separate routes and were built from a variety of materials Almost all the earliest walls have disappeared The remaining stone wall that is best known today was built about 500 years ago It was erected during the 6

Engineering the Great Wall of China — page 4 — MAP OF THE MING GREAT WALL This map shows some of the major sections of the Great Wall built by the Ming Dynasty What do you notice about the wall and where it was built Does seeing the map change the way you think about the Great Wall Beijing CHINA The Ming Great Wall

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