The Great Wall of China – known as one of the seven wonders if the world – is the only man-made object that can be seen from space by the naked eye. The current remains of the Great Wall wander through the northern part of China – connecting the eastern China Sea to the barren desert in the west. Today, more than 5,000 kilometers of the wall are still visible. As many scholars have stated, the Great Wall was meant to stop the invasions of the northern nomads, but nomads were never actually stopped by the wall. Constructed in 221 B.C. by the order of the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shihuang, the Great Wall was originally designed to be a military base where Chinese infantries would fight against cavalries from the north.

In order to complete the daunting task of constructing the Great Wall, Emperor Shihuang drafted more than 400,000 men – nearly half of the total male population in China – to work on this project. The construction lasted for more than 10 years and more than one-third of the workers died from harsh working conditions and deadly plagues.

While the wall protected the emperor from northern invasions, it did nothing to help defend him against the backlash and disdain that society had for him. As a result, the empire was seriously undermined by his neglect of people’s daily demands and eventually was overthrown by a farmers’ rebellion only four years after Emperor Shihuang’s death. A famous native love story is also related to the construction of this magnificent wall.

According to the story, a beautiful young girl by the name of Meng Jiang was married just before the emperor started construction on the Great Wall. Adhering to the emperor’s direction, her husband was forced to leave their new home just following their honeymoon to assist with the construction. Sadly, he never returned.

After three years of searching, Meng Jiang finally found the site where her husband had been working and was informed that he had died only a week earlier. The workers told Meng Jiang that his body was buried in the newly-constructed wall. Devastated by the news, Meng Jiang mourned for her husband by sitting at the burial site and crying for three days straight. As the legend goes, after the third day, the God was finally moved by her grand gesture and sent a great downpour of rain, which crumbled the wall and revealed her husband’s body.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 2:11 pm and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.