How the Great Wall of China was built

The Great Wall of China was built one little section at a time and it went on being built over many centuries. One can well imagine when the first sections were built in four, five, or six hundred BC there was no intent to build for posterity. All they wanted to do was to keep out the Northern invaders. Probably they had pilfered them and ransacked their homes and their fields a few years earlier and were now fearing a reprisal.

When one considers the scope of China and ponders how it got that way, it soon dawns it must have been by conquering their neighbors. If history book are right, that was the most important pastime of the age. Feuding and fighting and land grabbing was the only game in town for aspiring emperors. Someone came up with an idea to block them from bringing their horses and their carts in and making off with what was no longer theirs, therefore they began to build crude walls with dirt and the rocks they found near the location. Therefore lets assume, for this article, at least, that the wall was first built to keep out intruders.

It is possible they needed to clear the land for farming and had a need to do something with the stones that they removed from the soil and some innovative wall builder suggested this method. Anyway, however they built the first wall it was a crude affair and hardly any of it remains today. Only in certain sections around around the vast country of China are there any evidence of walls. The first walls were built out of natural stones with dirt pounded into them.

The parts of this national wonder called The Great Wall of China that does remain is now protected. It is great for their tourist trade. Later, much later probably – how does one know exactly – another wall was needed and it was in an area that had plenty of marble and heavier building materials. The walls continued to be built and since they used better building materials and their knowledge of how to build walls increased their quality of walls increased. The walls that are built around the Beijing area, (Peking then, probably)are kept in good repair and are an important tourist attraction.

Unlike today’s technology that can cut through mountainous terrains to buld roads, the walls that ancient Chinese construction workers built followed the rise and the fall of the land. If a wall was needed up a mountain it was built up mountain. According to the pictures I have seen, at the top of the wall will be a lookout tower and probably a place