S15E01

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. Today, we're walking the length of one of the world's greatest constructions, the Great Wall of China. The Great Wall is both older and newer than you might think. I want to dig down to its very foundations to learn when and how it was built, who built it and why and what controversial secrets lie buried in its storied past. It's a misty evening and the wind is howling along the ramparts, reaching you on top of the watchtower. Despite the thick padded armour you wear, the chill seems to reach your very bones. You hope as the last light fades that the low cloud will clear and you will get to see the awesome, seemingly limitless view across the flat northern plains. But for now, you shake off the cold and huddle closer to the low fire pit to warm your hands. The evening is peaceful. You hear only the rush of the wind, the flapping of imperial flags and the bustle of the soldiers garrisoned at this watch station, one of many positioned along the Great Wall. Looking down, you follow its crenellated ridge as far as your eyes can see. This stone part of the wall feels impenetrable. For many years now, the great Ming emperor has been bolstering this vital line of defence. It's a symbol of the strength and unity, a coiling tale belonging to the mighty Earth Dragon. The mineral smell of the stone wall after a day of rain, mingles with the smoke of the watchfires and something more metallic, gunpowder. Footsteps approach and you see a soldier making his way along the wall. He's covered in armour, carrying a matchlock firearm, one of China's earliest gunpowder weapons. But a traditional sword still remains at his side. This stretch of the wall is heavily fortified and with good reason. Leaving another soldier on watch, you climb down through the tower and pass through a small, warm room of off-duty soldiers. They take turns on watch, guarding the empire, but when off-shift, they gather around a playing board atop a barrel. They're playing Chinese chess, commanding small armies with generals, chariots, cannons, soldiers and advisors. One player quips at his opponent, then you chuckle along. They're proud to be stationed here. The wall is a physical manifestation of the Ming Empire's resolve to maintain stability and resist foreign threats. They barely look up as you go by, too engrossed in the game. After a brief refreshment, you slip back outside onto the wall. The cloud has lifted, revealing the day's last glimpse of the steps to the north, the lands of the Mongol raiders. You wonder if, looking back at you unseen from a distant hilltop, there stands an invader taking measure of the border. If ever or whenever the attack comes, you and your comrades will be ready. A climactic part of Assassin's Creed Chronicles China takes place on the Great Wall of China. To help me shed a light on the complex history of this iconic monument, I'm joined by historian, writer and travel guide Dr. Jeremiah Jennings. He was based in Beijing for over two decades and is the co-host of Barbarians at the Gate, a podcast exploring China's relations with the world, cultural encounters and shifting frontiers across history. Welcome to Echoes of History, Jeremiah. It's fantastic to have you with us. I can't wait to find out a bit more about the Great Wall of China. Thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. So this is something that I think probably in common with a lot of the audience. I will know of the existence of the Great Wall of China, but I probably don't know very much about it, really. So for a little bit of context to start us off with, can you tell us exactly where the wall is and how big it is? I think we all think it's a big thing, but how big is it? Sure. The Great Wall of China, or really what we should call it, the Great Walls of China, are a series of defensive fortifications that stretch for several thousand miles across the north, which today, roughly the northern boundary of the People's Republic of China. And in the earlier times, the area that separated what we think of as the heartland of Chinese civilization, the place where there was agriculture and trade, with the ecological zone of the steppe and the desert and areas that were for the most part dominated by people who had a pastoral economy, nomads, if you will. And why was the wall initially built? You suggested that it's maybe a defensive structure, but why was it built and then why was it extended? How did it get to be as big as it is? Sure. I think one of the things when we talk about the Great Wall too is I mentioned there are many walls and there are many walls, not just in terms of the actual structures, but in terms of time. There are walls that date back over 2000 years that didn't just separate what we think of as China from the steppe, but also separated different states within what became China. And this system or this practice of building walls developed over many, many, many centuries. Obviously, walls are at first to help protect the people within, trying to defend against people from the outside who may be attacking. But of course, walls are so much more. We think of Hadrian's Wall. We think of other walls in history. Walls also stamp order on a frontier. Frontiers, where two zones come together, can be messy places. And of course, when you put a wall there, you not only keep people out, but you also keep people in. It's a place not only to defend in terms of military, but it's also a place to check trade. It's also a place to project power. And so these walls, as they developed over time, over thousands of years in Chinese history, they had many different purposes. But the main purpose was, again, to define the space and the stamp order on an area that was a zone of contact and sometimes conflict. And like you say, I don't know if it's true of the case of the wall of China, but the walls can be a great way to remove any doubt about where the border is. You know, there's always lots of friction and fighting around borders and pushing them backwards and forwards. But if you put a wall there, it very clearly says this is where the agreed edge of the territories are. And there's no need to fight about precisely where the border stands because there's a massive wall to tell you. So it removes some of the potential for conflict, maybe. That's certainly part of it. We think about the era, for example, that takes place in the game, Assassin's Creed China in this era, in the 15th and 16th century. This frontier region between the area that's controlled by the Mongolian confederations and the area controlled by the dynasty, the Ming dynasty of China. This is an area where you have Mongolians coming across to trade. Mongolians being used as part of the border defenses paid for by the Chinese. You have Chinese farmers on the Mongolian side and Chinese traders and advisers who are following around different Mongolian cons. So it's a real kind of fluid zone. And of course, if you are the ruler of a state, particularly a state like Imperial China, like, wait a second, we need to have some kind of some idea of who's on what side. And for do that, we need to have something that actually forces people to choose a side. That way, when trade goes out, we can restrict it. That way, when people come in, we can restrict them. Let's put the let's put a wall there and see if that works. So if we thought about where it is and we thought a little bit about why it is, can we talk about when it is? When do they start building the Great Wall? And I guess to start off with, when does the first section appear? Because I guess then it's an ongoing project after that, isn't it? Some of the earliest walls that we know of in China actually go back to about 1500 BCE. These are tamped earth. You pack together stone and found stone and earth very tightly. They defended cities. They defended areas. They defended states. In about the third century BCE, a very famous ruler, Qin Shi Huang, some people may know him for his terracotta warriors. He is credited with unifying all these different states together in an imperial project. Sometimes he's thought of as the first emperor. And one of the things he does is, first of all, all those barriers that were in between the states he conquered, those go down. But the ones along the northern frontier, the ones that separate his realm from people who are outside his control, particularly those people of the steppe, those stay. And in fact, he expands them. He expands them to create or links together separate walls into one, if you will, long wall. And in Chinese, that's actually the name that is often used, is long wall as opposed to great wall. And this was the first kind of, if we think of it, he's often, he's not only credited with unifying China, he's the one who gets all the credit too with unifying the wall. Often if you go to Beijing today and they say, oh yes, the great wall. It was built by the emperor Qin Shi Huang 2000 years ago, and here it stands. It's the story, of course, is a little bit more complicated than that and a lot more interesting. Yeah, absolutely. So who else should we be thinking about when this happens? If it's not one man who was responsible for all of this, what is the context in the terms of the unification of China and the growing body politic that will become modern China for continuing to maintain this wall and continue to expand it and build it? If it's not just one man, why is there this ongoing drive to have this great wall there? Sure. It's common to think, especially in China today, of China having this unbroken, continuous history of this one dynasty after another. And to some extent that's true, but the reality is that each of these different dynasties that rose and fell and rose and fell over and over again over the centuries, were each kind of their own state with their own goals, their own strategies and their own objectives. And each of these different states, for their own reasons, would include wall building as part of their defenses or in some cases as part of their offense. Sometimes when the states were feeling threatened, they'd build walls and they'd try to hide behind them. But in some cases, for example, we look at the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth century, the era of what's known as the Tang Empire, when China in some ways was at its glory, its most glorious age, its most expansive age. And one of the things about the wall is it's not just a way to defend something, but when you build a wall out into the frontier, you're also stretching your arms out into that space. Once you build a wall, you can attack in front of the wall, just as easy as you can defend behind it. So these walls were built by different states over the centuries, sometimes for defense, sometimes for offense. But each time they built a wall and that state would fall or that dynasty would fall, very often their walls would gradually decay with them. And it would be up to subsequent dynasties, subsequent states to rebuild, maybe on the same spot, maybe not walls for their own purposes. So then does the direction and the ways in which the wall is maintained and expanded reflect the political motivations of individual rulers and individual dynasties? You know, they don't necessarily concentrate on the things that the dynasty before did, that bit of the wall is allowed to crumble because they're focusing somewhere else. Sure. If you think about how populations shift, right? So some places that didn't need to be defended in an earlier era now definitely need to be defended. Some areas, the step itself, we often think of the step, the nomads, the Mongols and the different groups that came before them. They're not static either. They're also in flux. They're also developing their own ideas of warfare and governance. So sometimes their strategies towards China change. And that also requires a different kind of construction or a different kind of relationship. I mentioned trade before. The walls were just as much about regulating trade as they were about regulating military conflict. And so that could also be part of the equation, the strategic and occasionally financial equation of wall building. And do Chinese records give us any hint of the more ordinary people involved? So as you said, it's quite often accredited to emperors and things like that. Do we see the names of any kind of designers or master builders coming down to us or did the records just not preserve those? It's interesting. The records of some of the people involved in the construction of the wall are carved into the wall itself. If you are to go to Beijing today and you are to go to the wall a little bit to the north of China's capital, much of the sections that you'll be taken to by the tour buses were built in the ancient era of 1986. But some of the sections up there are actually crumbly bits of the wall left over from the 16th century, the 15th century. And in those places you can see bricks and in the bricks are stamps. And these stamps indicate the names of the factories, the location of the workmen who made the bricks for that particular section. It was an early form of quality control because if you happen to deliver a substandard collection of bricks, well, the penalty could be quite severe. But it's fun to kind of walk along the wall and then you look and you see faded sometimes, but the names of a particular kill and a particular craftsman or a particular shop that made the bricks for that section. Immortalized in stone, if you will, in the structure they helped build. That's an incredible record, testament to the people stamped into the wall that lets us think a little bit beyond the emperors who take all of the credit for the work that thousands and thousands of other people must have done. In the game Assassin's Creed Chronicles China, it's set in the 1520s in Ming Dynasty China. Players get to climb the wall and run along the Great Wall of China. And in the game it looks kind of a little bit tired and worn out in places. There's scaffolding, there's obvious signs of construction around. So do we know what the wall would have looked like in the 1520s? Was it still being actively added to? Was it being maintained or was it beginning to crumble? Sure. The Ming Dynasty, the era in which the game is set, is a really special era because it's a Chinese dynasty that's come to power after a period in which all of China was part of the Mongolian Empire, when all of China was ruled by the Mongolians. So this dynasty, the Ming Dynasty, as they're formed, part of what they're trying to do is re-establish Chinese power, if you will, in China. And to do that, their relationship with their former overlords, the Mongols, it's a complicated one. And so during this time, they're not only occasionally going out into the steppe and attacking the Mongols on their own turf, sometimes successfully and sometimes suffering disastrous defeats. They're also trying to buy them off. They're also trying to give them titles. Part of this is a combination of strategies of which the wall is only one part. And what happens almost immediately after the timeline of the game is the Ming court, the emperor and his officials decide that a lot of the earlier strategies of trying to work with the Mongols have not been very successful. And that begins the real era of Ming Dynasty wall building, creating the bricks and towers and the integrated system of defense that we think of as the Great Wall, the one we see today. So what we're seeing in the game is structures that are part of the wall that will one day be part of a much larger structure being built piecemeal as you need it here, as you need it there. Usually the first part of the wall that gets built, and you can see this in the game, are those tall towers. And those towers, kind of like medieval castles, which I think gets a little bit more into your area, the medieval castles help to defend a region and project power. But to connect the towers, you need these walls. These walls not only keep people out, but they also provide an elevated highway, if you will. And you see this in the game to travel between the different points along the defensive structure. Fascinating. Is it fair to say then that the Ming Dynasty period, the period in which players can see it in the game, is a bit of a kind of high point for the wall. This is when it's becoming its most important. It's just before that period. The wall really doesn't become the structure we think of today until the end of the 16th century, even a little bit into the early 17th century. In fact, one of the antagonists in the game, Alton Khan, a fascinating figure, but one of the ways that Alton Khan threatens the capital, Beijing, is not just going through the fortifications and some of the passes, but simply traveling a couple hundred miles to the east and going around to areas where they just haven't gotten around to building a wall yet. And his actions doing that, and there are other Khans as well who are taking advantage of some of these gaps, is what ultimately convinces the court that we need to spend some significant money to fill in where the Mongols are coming through. And it becomes a game of kind of whack-a-Mongol. They came in through that pass, all right, we got to build a wall there. They came into the pass next to it, all right, extend the wall there. And by the time you get to the end of the 16th century, you have this rather significant structure that stretches, give or take, about like 8,000 or so kilometers. Although some of that is also natural defenses, too. You definitely need to patent the idea of a whack-a-Mongol game. I love that. I believe that some of the Ming Chinese generals tried to patent it, but yeah, didn't. I would play that game. There was a game called Bowling for Mongolians, and this was where you would take stone, hollowed out stones, fill them with gunpowder, and then you would roll them down, shoots in the wall, and they would bounce down the hill towards the on-gumming Mongolian horsemen. And the idea was that, of course, Mongolians on horseback are some of the most terrifying and effective military units available in this time. And these bombs, these rolling landmines, if you will, they didn't always get the Mongolian riders, but spoiler alert, and also, if you're sensitive to animals, be careful here. They were devastating for the horses. And of course, a Mongolian who has been thrown off his horse is just a guy running around and isn't nearly as terrifying as a cavalryman. Yeah, it's a fascinating use of gunpowder. So if the wall in the game's period setting is moving towards its pinnacle, are there specific periods when we see the wall decline in importance and perhaps begin to deteriorate? Sure. Throughout the, let's say, 2000, if not even longer era of wall building in China, when, for example, some of these groups from beyond where the wall is take over China, what use is a wall? So notably, as I mentioned, the Mongolians made China part of the Mongolian Empire beginning in the 13th century into the 14th century. For them, these defensive fortifications, some of them were useful because you always have to worry about the next Confederation coming through. But for the most part, they didn't do very much to maintain the wall. And as a result, people didn't quite forget it was there. But it in many places where it was mostly just tamped earth or not faced with bricks, like in earlier eras, it just kind of became part of the landscape. Here's an example. Marco Polo, who, of course, claims to have gone to China during the Mongolian imperial era and wrote a famous or dictated a famous book about it. It's always fun when you talk about Marco Polo, isn't it, to have to throw in there. He claims to have done these things. Yeah, he claims to do a lot of things. He won't be the last white guy to go to China and make outrageous claims about his influence there. But Marco, one of the knocks against Marco Polo is he mentions all these things, but doesn't mention the Great Wall. How do you possibly go to China and not mention the Great Wall? My aunt Matilda went to China. The first thing she showed me was pictures of the Great Wall. But of course, he was there during the Mongolian era. And in that time, the Great Wall may have been declined in importance because the Mongolians didn't have the same need for it as they as the Ming Dynasty would later on. The same thing happens after the Ming Dynasty in a much later period, beginning in the 17th century, another group from beyond where the Great Wall is located, a group called the Manchus. They come in and they also take over China and establish the Qing Dynasty. And during their era, except for a couple of strategic passes, the wall gradually lapses and it kind of falls into decay. As a defensive structure, did the wall fulfill its purposes? So you've mentioned then that it could be used to bowl great big empty cases of gunpowder down at the enemies. Did it do a good job of keeping forces out that the Chinese didn't want? Because it sounds like China has been taken over several times while the wall's been there. That's one of the things people often say about the Great Wall. It was this incredibly expensive project and it didn't work. That's not necessarily true. Of course, when you're talking about thousands of years of history and multiple incarnations of a wall, there's going to be times when it worked and there's going to be times when it didn't work. An example being Alton Kahn, the antagonist of the game, would very often try to find a way around the wall rather than take the wall on head on. And that's a good example of a wall being effective at what it does. On the other hand, walls in China and in other points and places in history are only as good as the people who are defending them. And the gatekeepers, the generals, the people who were in charge of making sure the wall was secure were just as susceptible to bribery, to intimidation, or to turning traitor as anywhere. And of course, that happened on numerous occasions as well, much to the detriment of the people inside the wall. Yeah. So is it fair to say that it's generally a success? But when you've got something that's there that's so successful, people are going to work really hard to find the flaws in it, to find ways around it, if not through it? Absolutely. And of course, like any military structure, like any defense, it's always going to be somebody who figures out a way to hack it. And then what happens is, and this is what the Ming Dynasty do, they figure out that what's wrong with their wall and they innovate to try to make it stronger. For example, it's the Ming Dynasty who take what used to be mostly kind of tamped earth walls, dirt walls, and face them with bricks. And not only does that make the wall stronger, but it means you can shape a wall to more closely hug the topography of the land and make it so there aren't as many gaps in between. And so this is an example of it didn't work, let's make it work better, and then go on from there. And there's a bit of human nature in this as well, in that building something so successful that does its job breeds complacency. And it gives people time to find a way to defeat it, they'll defeat it, and then you'll return to it and think, well, how do we do this again and do it better? It'll do its job for a while, you'll get complacent, someone will come through. So I guess it's a constant cycle that is just part of human nature. I think so. And I think also there's a feeling, especially in the Ming Dynasty, that the wall would have worked better if we had done more to support the people who were defending it and done more to support the infrastructure. The wall was an extraordinarily expensive thing to build. And this was a dynasty that had many other expenses. And one of the challenges for them was they always wanted to do defense on the cheap. The people who were guarding the wall trying to live out by the wall and were like, go farm out there, we don't need to send you food, you can grow stuff when you're not defending against the Mongolians. And sometimes that works and sometimes they're more like, well, you know, I haven't gotten paid, I'm starving, maybe I just let the Mongolians through. So one of the challenges for the Ming Dynasty and one of the things looking back that historians will sometimes say is you created a system of defense that was so expensive that eventually you were either going to run out of money or that eventually you were just going to run out of the money or resources necessary to adequately use that defensive placement. Yeah, yeah, I think governments are often very good during these periods at saying garrison that and defend it. We'll send you some money one day, you know, just just get on with it and we'll sort out paying you later. And that money kind of never comes and then it becomes more and more difficult to to maintain it. So they want it to be doing its job, but they don't want to pay properly for it. I mean, probably nothing changes very much, does it? There's a theory that it would have it would have been even worse had it not been for something that for globalization, because by the time you get to the 15th and into the 16th century, one of the things you're seeing are new crops appearing in Asia, particularly things like corn, ground nuts, like peanuts and sweet potatoes. Even today in the areas around Beijing, north of Beijing, where the wall is, these are the dominant crops in areas that do not grow wheat and do not grow rice. And so some of these new crops as they were coming in probably allowed some of these defenders to survive out there far longer than they might have in an earlier era. And you mentioned before that in China, this wall is often called the Long Wall. We call it the Great Wall. Do we know what it would have been called during the Ming dynasty and maybe when the name the Great Wall of China began to emerge? So the term that gets used in a lot of the Chinese sources in the earliest eras of wall building or when the wall was linked together by that first emperor translate as the the Long Wall of 10,000 li and li is roughly a third of a mile. This led later European scholars to say, well, then they took 10,000 divided it by three and that's roughly the length of the wall. Couple of things about that. One, 10,000 in classical Chinese doesn't mean exactly the number 10,000. It means kind of infinite. So a better translation is the Long Wall that goes on forever. That was a term that you see in the sources in earlier eras. It's interesting that by the time you to the Ming dynasty, when they're talking about their wall, they don't always, in fact, they often go out of their way to not use that term and have much more geographically specific descriptions of their fortifications. Like the wall that's guarding this pass or the wall that's doing this. And there are some theories as to why perhaps avoiding to avoid earlier associations with some of the dynasties that use the term the Great Wall, the Long Wall of 10,000 li. But they didn't necessarily call it a Great Wall like we think of it as the Great Wall. The term Great Wall is a Europe like a lot of like the Silk Road is a European invention. And of course, when the Europeans start coming to China and there had been not people had known about the Long Walls of China going back to Roman times. This was not a secret. But when when Europeans start coming to China in greater numbers, starting the 16th century and they do see the wall like, oh, my, this thing is actually a thing. That's when they begin to describe it, sometimes ascribing it almost impossible attributes like we can see it from space. You can't or that it, you know, it it was made with the bones of the workers. It wasn't. But still, this is where the mythology starts to come in. And of course, you have Richard Nixon, who in 1972, stood on top of it and said, this is a Great Wall for which he was widely mocked in the American press because the American media didn't actually record his second part of that statement, which is and it must have been built by a great people. But the first part stood as the lasting testament to the president's sort of inability to articulate what he was seeing in front of him. Never mind. He did something else to compensate for that and eradicate that from people's memories. Exactly. Not what Nixon was destined to be remembered for. We can obviously people can visit the Great Wall today. You can walk along the Great Wall. How similar an experience would it be to visit the wall today to in the Ming dynasty? There's far fewer people shooting at you. So that certainly makes it easier. Bonus. The wall today, the reconstructed sections of the wall today and many of the sections that you visit when you go to go to Beijing have been all joking aside, very heavily renovated, if not reconstructed in the 19th century. The wall is a very very important part of the history of the Ming dynasty. The wall is a very important part of the history of the 1980s. On the one hand, it isn't necessarily I am touching the stone that the Ming dynasty soldiers leaned against as they waited the next assault. On the other hand, it also looks a little bit more like it might have or a version of it in its heyday. You get into the areas where it's falling down. The towers aren't as rebuilt and pretty on Instagram. But it is actually the real stone. As I mentioned, the quality control stamps. You even can find some of these old hollowed out stones that were used to bowl for Mongolians. Piles of them in the bush just at the ready. Of course, hundreds of years after they've long since no longer been needed. And I find that that experience, even though it may not look like it probably did back in the day, I feel a stronger connection to the history there than I do when I'm standing on the reconstructed sections and some guy is trying to sell me a t-shirt. I think that's fascinating because the reconstruction, I guess, has value in terms of showing you what it looked like at its heyday. But I think I'd probably be with you in wanting to get off the tourist trail and see the more kind of authentic, the more genuine. And the idea that you can see some of those hollowed out balls that were once used to defend off Mongolian invaders, I think is absolutely fascinating. So if I'm ever lucky enough to go, I may give you a call, Jeremiah, and I'll ask you where to to go and visit. Can I can I give a quick shout out here, too? If you do go, there's a historian, a Great Wall specialist, a Brit named William Lindsay. He lives out by the Great Wall. William, in 1987, ran the length of the Great Wall. This was after a 1984 feat in which he ran the length of Hadrian's Wall. And if you ever get a chance to go to Beijing and you really want to learn about the wall and see the wall, get in touch with William Lindsay and do one of his Great Wall weekends in which he takes people around the area near his house out by the wall. It's a fascinating way to get in touch with the real history away from the tour groups and the tour guides. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack or Julius Caesar or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by History Hit, because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience. What's an all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries, as well as probing into everyday issues, the nitty gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right. Time to slide out here and avoid the bedpan. How much of the Great Wall would you say you've walked in your time in China? That's a good question. When I just recently moved out of China, when I was living there, I was teaching and I would take students to the Great Wall quite a bit. So probably 10 to 15 times a year, at least I would be doing hiking or leading trips on the Great Wall, sometimes more. And it was always different sections, too. It depended upon the group. Younger students, we take them to the places it's a little bit easier to get to. Older students, we take we take them college students, we take them to the more crumbly bits. And but the great thing about it is there are different places you can go to even if you've been to the Great Wall before, you can go to a different place and see a very different side of it. Here's an example, not too far away from Beijing, but in an opposite direction from the tourist Great Wall. The one we see in all the postcards is a section of wall that actually goes all the way back to about the fourth or fifth century BCE. And it's a part of the wall that divided up the state of Yan, which is one of these old kingdoms way back before the Emperor Qin unified China. And that wall, at all of its rammed earth glory, sits in the middle of a farm field about an hour and a half west of Beijing. And so there are parts of it that you can see that are very different from the one that I think most of us expect when we go there. And for me, how where I go on the wall, the different places I visit, whether it's the brick and towers by Beijing, these tamped earth walls west of Beijing, or even far out into the very far deserts of western China where the wall peters out into the sand. There's all kinds of different places that I've explored. And I would recommend if you come to China to check those out. This is very much making me want to go to China. I've never been lucky enough to go, but I'm definitely adding it to my wish list. You mentioned when we're talking earlier about a myth around human bones being within the construction of the wall. So, again, you know, it's not my especially I don't know too much about the Great Wall, but I've heard stories about skeletons being buried under the wall or human bones being found in parts of the wall. Is any of that true? Possibly. We're talking about a massive construction project, many massive construction projects over many centuries. Is there is it possible that people were buried in around or possibly as part of the wall? Perhaps. But the myth of the wall being a mass grave of the workers in tuned in the in this structure is almost certainly a myth. And if we think about just from an engineering perspective, why would you do that? Because if you had human bodies inside a wall and they decay, you suddenly have a very hollow wall inside. That said, there is a myth. There is a story that goes back to the very beginnings of wall building in China of a time. And this was often the case where the workers were conscripted from their villages. And in this particular story, a husband is conscripted from the village and has taken far away to the build the wall. And for many years, he's up there and his wife is quite concerned. And finally, frantically, she gets no word. She travels to the wall to see him. And when she gets there, she learns that he has died and she is so overcome with grief, overcome with emotion that her cries break the wall. Such is heaven's empathy with her heartbreak. And when the wall breaks, she sees the body of her husband. Now, this could be part of the this mythology of the wall. As I said, are there mass graves in the wall? No. Is the story literally true? Probably not. But the idea that the wall cost lives, which is really the what is behind these stories, is absolutely true. Think about what it would take to bring massive amounts of labor, sometimes conscript labor, sometimes paid labor, up to this place in an often and very difficult or remote regions operating huge giant stones or huge or bringing in large loads of sand and stone and rock. I'm sure thousands, thousands and thousands of people died in building the wall. And so while the stories itself may not be literally true, in a way, metaphorically speaking, they do represent the sacrifice of the people whose names we do not know whose lives were given to construct the wall. Yeah, I was thinking, as you were saying that story, it sounds almost like it being used as a metaphor for the fact that the construction of the wall swallowed these people. They're not literally inside the wall, but their lives were given in order for the wall to be built so that it's almost like that metaphor has slipped into being taken literally. Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned there are there are ancient bits of the wall remaining. There are reconstructed bits that date from the 1980s. So I'm quite interested in how much archaeology goes on around that. Did the process of reconstructing parts of it involve any archaeology or did it destroy the opportunity for archaeology? And is there any archaeology that goes on around the older parts of the wall, too? It's interesting. For a long time, great wall studies wasn't really a thing in Chinese academia. There were archaeologists who looked at defensive fortifications. But for all of its importance in China's national identity today, it really isn't until you get to the later 20th century, even the 21st century, that you start to see really systematic studies from China on the wall and the kind of archaeological work on the wall that we see being done in other historical sites in Europe, Africa, Middle East and other parts of Asia. There have been some really interesting things, not just with archaeology, but also with geography, trying to actually map and figure out where the walls are, particularly trying to extend the length of the wall as much as is possible. I think the current tally right now is something like 21000 kilometers of great wall, though I suspect that includes not just all the great walls ever built in North China, but a fair number of sheep pens and garden fences as well. Whatever is there, we'll just add it in. There has been some interest and some work being done more recently. But you go back to it's interesting in the 19th and early 20th century, a lot of the foreigners who come to China are a little bit surprised at how cavalier most people are about the wall. They're like, oh, yeah, it's up there. That's how I built my house, because I grabbed a bunch of stones off that tower and it made a great house. And it was a little bit strange given just how fascinated the foreigners were and how little it seemed that the people in China at the time really cared about it. As I said, that has changed more recently. And today, of course, the Great Wall is a symbol in China, sometimes also in its own ahistorical way, a sign of China's unity against all, a sign of China's never actually being an aggressor. Always being defensive, that kind of thing. But it is interesting that the archaeology is a much more recent thing than in some other, for example, in the field of tombs, which has long been in the fixation of many archaeologists from China. Yeah. Is there anything in particular that you think archaeology of the Great Wall might tell us over coming years? I think it might be interesting in terms of archaeology, not just of the wall itself, but on sites on both sides of the walls to paint a more interesting and complicated picture of the relationship of the people divided by the wall. It's not just a situation of China on one side, Mongolia on the other side, China on one side, this group on the other side. Of course, there was a lot of give and take. And so what was the relationship and how did the wall change that? Here's an example. Our antagonist, Alton Khan, who attacks the wall, attacks Beijing in the 16th century. One of the reasons he does that is because of economic sanctions. The Mongolians relied on the China relied on the Ming Dynasty. They relied on China for trade for goods that they could not get out in the steppe. Meanwhile, China relied on the Mongolians to bring in horses that they could not raise in China. And this trading relationship, uneasy as it was, kept the peace. But of course, over time, they became concerned that the trade relationship wasn't balanced. And so therefore we needed to place restrictions on the trade. And these sanctions, especially from the Ming Dynasty against Alton Khan, created a situation where Alton Khan, needing of course materials for his people and also loot for his soldiers, felt he had almost no choice but to take a more direct approach to the problem. But of course, we know about that direct approach. We know about the attack. What led up to it? What are the economic realities? What are the interactions? What is the diplomacy? What are those points of contact? The archaeology I'm most interested in isn't necessarily who built the tower. It's what did the tower mean to the people on either side? Yeah, yeah, it's a fascinating way to look at it, I think. I'll have to keep my voice down, because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack? Or Julius Caesar? Or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by History Hit. Because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience. What's an all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries, as well as probing into everyday issues, the nitty gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right, time to slide out of here and avoid the bedpan. What would you say is the legacy of the Great Wall of China? And maybe we could separate that into the legacy for Imperial China under successive emperors and then what the legacy is in modern China. So maybe we think about what the imperial legacy of it is. What did it mean to successive emperors? Each state had its own approaches to defense. And so as a result, each dynasty didn't necessarily consider too much what the wall is defensive fortifications meant symbolically to the dynasty before. They just thought of how is this how does my defensive needs similar or different from the defensive needs of the person who built these? How can I use them or not use them or modify them to suit my goals? So it was a lot more practical than it was in terms of symbolism. The legacy in terms of Imperial China is kind of in fixing that northern border that that's the limit of where China goes, at least in the north. So it was almost it then becomes almost a restriction for an imperial power that can't move beyond this physical boundary. There is an element of the wall that does establish a limit, if you will. But it also set but also that where the wall is moved a lot over time. So it wasn't a fixed point to a lot of people in Imperial China. The wall also represented the end of civilization. Now, the people on the other side might not have felt the same way. But some of the references to the walls and to the passes, whether written by emperors or written by poets, often involve a kind of sadness. They've been in exiled or they're traveling far and they know that once they leave the wall, once they leave the wall behind, they're in the great unknown. And I think for them, the wall then represents the limits, not politically or militarily, but of their civilization, of their culture. And what is beyond there is frightening, could be exciting, but it is certainly the unknown. And what would you say is the most significant legacy, perhaps, for modern China? What does the wall mean in China today? Well, in the early 20th century, the wall started to take on a new symbolism of China's resilience as a civilization, as a people. Here is a tangible example of the Chinese people's refusal to submit. Even in times when they were bested, they always came back. And during, of course, the really very difficult and brutal occupation of China by the Japanese armies during World War II, the idea of the wall as being this symbol that, yes, we will stand up, we will fight to our very last person. This became encoded in a lot of the pop culture of the era. In fact, a song that was written for a movie in 1935 begins, The rise, ye who shall not be slaves, with our own flesh and blood we shall build a new great wall. And this particular song with those lyrics in 1949 became the anthem of the People's Republic of China. And it's the song you hear multiple, multiple times during any Olympic Games. It's the same national anthem today. So it's part of the national anthem. Mao Zedong, Chairman Mao, of course, the Chinese leader in the mid 20th century wrote poems in which he talked about the wall of 10,000 Li. So in the 20th century, we do start to see an association with the wall, a romantic association, a nationalist association with the wall that might not have existed in an earlier era. Does it come to be something like an equivalent of, say, the English or British Arthurian legend? This idea of something that's representative of a people's determination and the fact that they can't be beaten and that there will be, you know, in Arthur's case, the once and future king, he will come back and save us. That the wall comes to represent something that all Chinese people can recognize and adhere to, or am I making a connection there that doesn't exist? No, I think I think there are many symbols like that in Chinese civilization, but the wall is certainly a very important example of that. There's an expression that you cannot be a true. The translation is somewhat gendered, but a true son of the Han, a true Chinese, if you will, if you haven't climbed the Great Wall, and you can go to the Great Wall and get a t shirt with that written on it if you like. There's also this idea that the Great Wall represents China's architectural and engineering prowess, you know, as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's something Chinese are proud of, not just for what it means in terms of their national character, but for their national ability. Here is whether you can see it from space or not. It is one of, if not the largest series of manmade structures in the world. And even when you go back 2,000 years, even if it isn't the bricks and towers you see today, it's still a remarkable engineering feat. And so, of course, that also is a source of great, justifiably, a source of great pride among many modern Chinese today. Yeah, fascinating. It's meant so many different things across its vast lifespan and its vast distance. It can mean different things to different people at different times. It's also one of those places, if you do get a chance to go to China, to stand on the Great Wall is really an incredible privilege. As I mentioned, I worked in China, I would go to the Great Wall quite a bit. And I will tell you, for all the hundreds of times that I've been on standing on the wall, it never once did not move me that I am standing on a part of this incredible historic series of structures. And the stones and the area that I am standing in is part, it connects me with a legacy that goes back centuries, in some cases, thousands of years. And it's like any historian. It's hard not to be kind of overcome with the emotion of that moment. Yeah, amazing. I want to go even more. The more I talk to you, the more I want to go, Jeremiah. Just to end this episode on then, in Assassin's Creed, players are able to enter the Animus, they're able to travel back in time and relive the memories of their ancestors. If we could get you into an Animus and we could send you back to any moment in the history of the Great Wall of China, what would you like to witness the most? Well, allowing for the fact that if I was just to fly on the wall, being in one of the battles at the Great Wall would be interesting, sure. But the historian in me actually wants to be in one of the offices back in the capital, as they're debating the financial realities of building something like this. And I know that sounds boring when you compare that with arrows flying and swords and horses, but the reality is that that's where the decisions were made. And sometimes the decisions that were made in those rooms aren't always as clear as the battles that were fought, and yet have far greater importance in terms of how history has unfolded. And some of those arguments, some of those debates between extraordinarily learned men and some not so learned men, and maybe even a few women if they happen to wander in, because China back in the day was China back in the day. But regardless, that's where the history happened. That's why I think I'd kind of want to be hanging out there. And again, also safer. Yeah, definitely. That's a brilliant answer. Thank you very much. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Jeremiah. I am off to Google how much it is to fly to China and walk the Great Wall of China, because now I really, really want to go and see some of this for myself. Thank you so much for your time and for getting us so close to the Great Wall. Well, thank you, Matt. It's been a great privilege to be on their show and good luck. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. In the next episode, we'll discover just how effective the Ming Dynasty's works on the Great Wall were as we look at Mongol invasions of China. Next week, we're taking a close look at the Imperial Court of Ming, China and the infamous eunuchs known as the Eight Tigers. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're enjoying it, you can leave us a review too. I'll see you next time among the Echoes of History. Follow from Bomb to Ballot wherever you get your podcasts.