Considering that it was constructed for the purpose of keeping foreigners out of China, it’s ironic that the Great Wall has become China’s number one attraction for visitors from abroad.

If you’ve only done the chairlift at Badaling, however, you can hardly count yourself as a Wall veteran. Indeed, speak to any tourist visiting Beijing, and you may well get the impression that there are only three parts of the Great Wall to be seen in the country. Backpackers are especially quick to make fun of the Badaling and Mutianyu crowd, and speak in hushed tones of the “real” wall at Simatai.

Let’s be honest - all three of these sections are intensely marketed to tourists of varying persuasions - and while all of them are fine parts of the Wall to see, on a monument with sections scattered across the country there is certainly a lot more ground to be covered.

We may no longer be able to follow in the steps of William Lindesay - the Briton who journeyed the entire length of the Wall on foot in 1987 - but there are still numerous locations within reach of Beijing where visitors can enjoy features and designs unique to each particular section.

If you want to be able to stay a step ahead of those backpackers who assume they’ve seen more of China than you have just because they’ve climbed some stairs at Simatai, take a day off to see some of the less-travelled Wall and give yourself something really worth boasting about.

Don’t forget that much of the Great Wall in this part of the country climbs near-vertical mountain faces, so if the only exercise you’ve been doing is thumbing through boxes of DVDs, gird yourself to expend some effort. The Wall sections in most of these locales are rough staircases up mountainsides. The climb, however, is more than worth the effort.

If you’re making a weekend of it, you’ll usually be able to find a local farmer with a room to rent - they’re used to tourists coming knocking. In Xifengkou, however, you’ll need to go back to Qianxi to find a hotel, and in Jiumenkou and Laolongtou, head for the walled city of Shanhaiguan to spend the night.

A group of heritage guardians will use laser range finders, global positioning system (GPS) devices and digital cameras to make detailed records, brick by brick, of the mammoth structure.

The field survey is part of the 10-year Great Wall Protection Project that kicked off last month, said Chai Xiaoming, deputy director of the Heritage Protection Department of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage.

The survey will take at least two years and involve hundreds of specialists, Chai said, adding that an overall protection plan for the structure is expected to be completed by 2009.

A massive repair programme on the Wall, only one-fifth of which is considered well preserved, will follow the survey. Special patrol teams will also guard against further man-made damage of the Wall, the paper says.

“By 2014, when the overall project is scheduled to be finished, we will not only have a clear and complete picture of the current conditions of the Great Wall and its landscape, but also have a basic legal framework for its protection, such as marking out its preservation areas and buffer zones,” the paper quotes Cai Xiaoming as saying.

At present, all the State-level heritage sites, except the Great Wall, have clearly defined preservation areas and buffer zones. The survey will help China control construction projects near the Wall.

Luo Zhewen, a renowned heritage expert, said the field survey will be “extremely arduous.”

He said the central government had tried many times since the 1950s to find out the real conditions of the Great Wall, but attempts were never completed because of various reasons.

Summer comes, the booming flowers and colored leaves cover the mountains. The Great Wall snakes its way like a silver necklace. What a nice sight!

When fall comes, the mountains are blanketed by colors, creating an amazing view and the weather during this time is pleasant. This season could be the best season to visit.

The mountains and the wall itself are covered with snow in winter, offering an awesome snowy scene. The weather in this time of the year will be frozenly cold and tourists are fewer. It is the best time to get the whole view of the wall.

On June 25, 1899 an interesting story about the Great Wall of China appeared in three Denver newspapers. It said that the Chinese were going to tear the Great Wall down and build a road in its place, and that to complete this project they were taking bids from American firms.

The news supposedly came from a Chicago engineer, Frank C. Lewis, who was one of those bidding for the job. From Denver the story made its way to Chicago and the East Coast where it appeared as front page news in numerous papers. Of course, not a word of the story was true. It had been created as a joke by three reporters working on separate Denver papers to spice up a slow news day.

The story might have ended there and been remembered as nothing more than a minor hoax, but many years later a rumor began to circulate about what happened when the news reached China.

Supposedly the Chinese had been infuriated by the hoax and took up arms against Westerners in retaliation, thus starting the Boxer Rebellion. This rumor grew and grew until it reached the official status of fact. It proved to be (and continues to be) a popular morality tale told by preachers to their congregations in order to demonstrate the harmful consequences of lying.

But in actuality the Great Wall of China hoax had nothing to do with the Boxer Rebellion. The idea that it did has been traced to a 1939 article by Harry Lee Wilber that appeared in the North American Review. Apparently Wilber was guilty of that old journalistic strategy of taking a good story and improving it.

References: Harry Lee Wilber, “A Fake That Rocked the World,” in Great Hoaxes of All Time, Robert Medill McBride and Neil Pritchie (eds.), Robert C. McBride Co., New York, 1956: 17-24

Ancient Wonder, Modern Challenge
AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE FOR THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA ICON—WORLD MONUMENTS MAGEZINE
BY WILLIAM LINDESAY

In the early 1580s, an illustrated manuscript was delivered to the Antwerp atelier of renowned cartographer Abraham Ortelius. According to the manuscript’s purveyor, Arius Montanus, a Benedictine monk and one of the cartographer’s most trusted informants, the document had come from Luiz Jorge de Barbuda, a brother in the Society of Jesus and a prominent Portuguese geographer. On a chart, Barbuda had summarized various discoveries and observations made by Jesuit missionaries in the Far East since the establishment of Portugal’s colony at Macao in 1550. Ortelius included a copy of the chart-the first map of China ever published in the Western world-in his 1584 edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the Whole World).

Perhaps more important, the illustration provided the West with its first glimpse at what was destined to become one of the world’s most famous monuments-the Great Wall of China. Alongside the rendering of the Great Wall was a brief inscription: Murus quadringentarorum leacarum, inter montium crepidines a rege Chine contra Tartarorum ab hac parte eruptiones, extructus (A wall of 400 leagues, between the banks of the hills, built by the King of China against the breaking in of the Tartars on this side).

With a purported length of approximately 1,200 English miles, some regarded the Great Wall depicted on Ortelius’ map as the grotesque sea monsters guarding the deep. Nevertheless, the Great Wall would become a standard cartographic element, appearing on numerous maps, including one published in 1590 by Venetian Giacomo Gastaldi, which illustrated the route taken by Sir Francis Drake during his 1577 circumnavigation. For the cartographic community, the Great Wall of China was neither building nor landmark, but an integral part of Earth’s geography.

Built during the Ming dynasty (A.D. 1368-1644), the Great Wall of China depicted on the maps was the last in a succession of defensive walls raised to protect the country’s northern frontier from nomadic attack. At least 16 Great Walls were built between the fifth century B.C. and the sixteenth century A.D.; collectively, they stretched an estimated 50,000 kilometers across the Chinese landscape, most of them taking different routes from their predecessors. Five of the walls were known as wan li chang cheng (walls of boundless length) due to their enormous scale. Of these, the Qin Dynasty (221-207 B.C.) Wall is the oldest; the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D.220) Wall, which runs some 7,200 kilometers, the longest. The Liao and Jin Great Walls, built during the earth and twelfth centuries, were, ironically, the work of the very invaders China’s emperors worked so hard to keep out. The Ming Wall, built in large part during the reign of Wanli (A.D.1572-1620), is the youngest of the walls, the most militarily sophisticated and grand, and by far the best preserved.

Eventually developing into a tortuous system of border defenses, including loops and spurs, and measuring some 6,700 kilometers by the time of its abandonment in 1644, the ruins of the Ming Dynasty Great Wall are architecturally varied and collectively constitute the world’s largest cultural relic in sheet building-material volume. Early travelers to the region attempted to relate the scale of the wall to those back home. British audiences of the late 1790s were told in An Authentic Account of an Embassy From the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China that “the amount of stone in the wall was equivalent to all the dwelling houses of England and Scotland.” If dismantled and reconstructed at the equator, readers were told, there would be enough material to build a smaller wall that could circle the globe twice. Adam Warwick, in a 1923 edition of National Geographic, showed his American readership on a map “where the wall would run if transferred to the United States,” while L. Newton Hayes, a missionary’s son living in Tianjin, speculated in human eye from Mars.” Hardly a book, magazine, documentary, or travel feature since has not included the trivial—and outright fiction—that the structure is visible from the Moon.

Architecturally, the Ming Wall contains a number of structural elements, linked physically or lying in relatively close proximity to the wall. In desert areas the wall was made of rammed earth; only in mountain regions was it made of quarried stone and brick. Aside from the wall itself, the most common architectural elements are beacon towers, used for signaling, storage, shelter, and withstanding siege in the event of attack. Most towers were square or rectangular in plan, a few circular or ovoid. The more important towers had large central chambers to accommodate section commanders, while less important ones were simple networks of interlocking arched corridors. Most towers were two-story structures with flat roofs, but a few had apex-roofs, as evidenced by occasional room walls and roof tiles. More elaborate roofs had ridge ends and roof guardians, and rare field evidence shows that some roofed structures even had decorative tile ends bearing monster faces. Many towers contained engraved tablets recording visits of military officials and other visiting dignitaries. Along the wall, many gates were built to accommodate the passage of people and water, and grand fortresses were constructed at the most vulnerable locations. The best examples of these are the terminal fortresses of Jiayuguan, at the western end of the Ming Wall, and Shanhaiguan, at the eastern end of the wall’s main line. Jiayuguan is located on the desert escarpment between two mountain ranges, while Shanhaiguan occupies the narrow band of coastal plain between the Yellow Sea and mountains.

Having defended China for more than two millennia, the last of the Great Wall, like its predecessors, was eventually abandoned, this time in the wake of the Manchu invasion of 1644. Today, 359 years since construction ceased, the Great Wall is a mere shadow of its former self. Over the centuries, various forces, both natural and man-made, have conspired to alter, damage, and destroy it, leaving an estimated 4,500 kilometers—or two-thirds—of its original structure standing. What remains of the wall presents one of the world’s great conservation challenges.

As soon as the Ming Dynasty collapsed, the military looted the wall for the best pickings, removing wooden doors and shutters of towers, fine carvings, and engraved slabs of stone. Nature, too, has done its past. Winds have deposited sand on the pavement of the wall. Bird droppings containing seed soon colonized the pavement with plants—weeds at first, then bushes and small trees. Roots have loosened masonry, and once-a-century earthquakes have struck and toppled sections of the wall. Arches have weakened and collapsed, and towers have cracked. Winter freeze-thaw cycles have gradually forced slabs of rock apart. Summer rains have washed away loose mortar. A wilderness wall, or wild wall, has evolved.

To protect something fully, one must first define its boundaries. It is important to understand that the wall and its surroundings are archaeologically inseparable, united in a consanguineous relationship. The land beside the wall and in view of the wall is where stones were quarried, where bricks were baked, where clay was dug, where trees were felled to fuel kilns, and where the wall builders lived and worked. In essence, the wall is a reflection of the very land from which it was created.

Following the abandonment of the Ming Wall, it is quite likely that many of those who built, guarded, and maintained it remained, living in its shadow as ordinary farmers. It also follows that the modern inhabitants of wall-side villages are descendants of the ancient wall builders. Sometimes this can be verified: for example, bricks sometimes bear cartouches that record the provincial military construction unit, and these often match with the location of villagers’ ancestral homes.

In mountain areas, village buildings themselves might also be considered part of the landscape, as many were wrought of material removed from the wall during the destructive revolutionary campaigns of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1959) and Cultural Revolution (1966-1977), when Chairman Mao Zedong urged people to “let the past serve the present” and “smash the four olds by sweeping away the dust of all the old ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the exploiting classes.”

The Great Wall is therefore a rich cultural tapestry that encompasses not only the varied architectural remains, but also the local people who have inherited tales and legends relating to the wall from older generations. So distinct and striking is this landscape that perhaps it deserves a name to reflect its significance. “Wallscape” would seem appropriate.

The concept of a wallscape can best be appreciated by viewing a section of the original Great Wall in comparison to a section whose space has been invaded by modern construction. From enjoying the former we realize that the majesty of the Great Wall has two components: the ancient building and the natural backdrop. Once the wall’s surroundings are violated by modern intrusions, the majesty of the view is diminished. In addition to the degenerative problems of old age, the wall is under constant attack by man. Vast sections of the wild wall close to Beijing, that only a few years ago were out of reach, suddenly have become more accessible. Cars got cheaper, suburban roads improved, and local townships, eager to get a piece of Great Wall tourism for themselves, even erected road signs to point the way to drivers. This new popularity of the Great Wall prompted local farmers, township officials, and country entrepreneurs to jump on the bandwagon and try their hands at shadow-of-the-wall tourism. Exploiting the absence of a single specific law to protect the unique wall—as an all-encompassing cultural landscape—crass commercialism has sprung up beside, or even upon, the wall in many places. Picnic rubbish has been wantonly discarded, people have scrawled on the 500-year-old bricks, and encroaching development has resulted in a group of ugly, bright buildings that seem alien—modern intrusions on this ancient landscape.

In February 2002, when American president George W. Bush visited the Great Wall at Badaling, he said: “The wall’s the same, the country’s changed a lot.” Bush had been to China when his father, the former president, was stationed in Beijing as U.S. ambassador in the 1980s. Had the president wanted to comment accurately on the state of the Great Wall, he would have been correct if he had said: “The wall’s not the same, because the country has changed a lot.”

As China continues to record massive economic growth, which in turn is changing lifestyles, the Great Wall takes on added importance by offering preservationists a new horizon in their seemingly futile quest to tackle conservation of the world’s largest cultural relic in the world’s most populous country and most rapidly booming economy.

Until recently, plans to protect the wall had not matched these massive social changes. China has adhered to the maxim of the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping: “Love China, rebuild the Great Wall.” uttered in the wake of Mao-sanctioned destruction of things historical, including the Great Wall.

Nationwide, a dozen or so sections of wall have been patriotically reconstructed for mass tourism. For almost 20 years this approach has defined Great Wall conservation.

For the past three years, International Friends of the Great Wall, working in collaboration with the Beijing Bureau for Cultural Relics, UNESCO’s Beijing Office, and the World Monuments Fund, has spearheaded a program to create awareness of the problems afflicting the wall via the domestic and international press and media, and piloted a stewardship field program. Inclusion of the Great Wall Cultural Landscape in the Beijing Region on WMF’s 2002 list of the 100 Most Endangered Sites has highlighted the plight of the Great Wall so that its conservation might find a place on China’s cultural relics protection agenda.

Partly as a result of these efforts, Great Wall conservation moves into the modern era this Summer, as the Beijing Municipal Government introduces the first generic cultural relics protection laws aimed at combating the destruction—physical and spiritual—of the wall, albeit only in the Beijing area. The leasing of land to developers adjacent to the wall will be banned, people will be prohibited from accessing certain fragile sections, and buildings causing “visual pollution” will be razed to preserve China’s Great Wallscape.

A study has found the Great Wall of China has deteriorated considerably over the past 100 years, and the battlements themselves are now in need of defending.

The series of walls and battlements dates back to 550 BC and stretches from the Bohai Sea to the Gobi Desert.

A British geographer living in Beijing, William Lindesay, is the pre-eminent non-Chinese expert on the Great Wall, and says it is his passion.

“In terms of wonders of the world you can’t find anything to compete with the Ming Dynasty Great Wall,” he said.

“It took more time to build, more people to build, consumed more building material than anything else in human history and it will never be surpassed in terms of scale.”

But his enthusiasm is tempered by the findings of his own research.

Mr Lindesay has taken hundreds of old photographs of the Great Wall - some 50 years old and some 100 years old - and laboriously re-photographed exactly the same locations.

The results of his re-photography study will be released in Beijing later today.

They show huge sections of the Great Wall, and the towers along it, completely destroyed over the last century.

Scavengers, tourists

Mr Lindesay says the wall is crumbling.

“Suddenly people realise that the Great Wall of China needs defending itself,” he said.

And he believes he knows why it is deteriorating.

“In the last 50, 60 years, it’s people going up to the wall and using the material as a quarry - the bricks especially,” he said.

“Most serious in the last few years in the Beijing area has been unmanaged and unauthorised tourism development.”

Some parts of the Great Wall have become crowded with tourists and souvenir sellers, as poor local farmers try to convert their piece of wall into the next tourist hot-spot.

The car fumes, the shops and the sheer visitor numbers have all taken their toll on the wall, and in some places the wall has been blasted open to make way for roads.

But Chinese government authorities have shown Mr Lindesay the blueprint for Badaling - the wall’s most popular tourism location.

“All of the shlock is going to be moved back three kilometres,” he said.

“The car parks, the t-shirt market, the coffee shops and the restaurants - everything is going to be moved back.”

Using the research of Mr Lindsay and his Chinese counterparts, the Great Wall is being restored.

As of January 1, there are strong fines for having social functions on the ancient wall or stealing bricks from it.

Despite the huge damage that was also caused by fighting during World War II, thousands of kilometres of Great Wall remain.

It is an enormous and sometimes isolated structure and its preservation will be a difficult task.

      Dating back to 656 B.C. when China had the earliest record about great wall, the construction of great walls underwent more than 20 Chinese feudal dukedoms and dynasties for over 2,000 years. With a total length of about 50,000 km, the great walls are distributed in 20 or so Chinese provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government.  

      The Great Wall Online is the name of an important news web site in Hebei Province. Why was it given the name? And why was it preceded by the term Great Wall?

      In the land of Hebei, there exist Great Walls built in different periods ranging from the Warring States Period (475-221 B.C.) to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). In the Warring States Period, the states of Zhao, Yan and Zhongshan built their own great walls. You can find the remains of them today. After Emperor Qin Shi Huang made China unified in 221 B.C., the Qin great walls were built. They can be found in Chengde and Zhangjiakou, two cities in north and northwest Hebei. In the periods of the Southern and Northern Dynasties and the succeeding dynasties like the Liao and Jin, great walls were constructed continuously. The remains of the walls built in the dynasties of Northern Wei, Northern Qi and Jin are located in north Hebei, mostly in the cities of Zhangjiakou, Chengde and Qinhuangdao. 

      Today when people talk about the great wall, it refers to the Great Wall built in China’s Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in most occasions. During a period of more than 200 years in the Ming, the Great Wall underwent construction for 18 times. Starting from the Yalu River in Liaoning Province and ending in the Jiayuguan Pass in Gansu Province, the Great Wall of China stretches as long as 7,000 km (including its inner walls). The section of the Great Wall in Hebei, which starts from Laolongtou at the district of Shanhaiguan, Qinhuangdao and ends in the Mashikou Pass at Huai’an County, Zhangjiakou, is 1,200 km. If the inner walls are included, it can be as long as 2,000 km.

      The section of the Great Wall in Hebei passes through many counties and districts under the cities of Tangshan, Qinhuangdao, Chengde, Zhangjiakou and Baoding, and in some areas it passes through Hebei’s borders with Liaoning Province, Shanxi Province, Beijing and Tianjin Municipalities. About 300 passes and countless blockhouses, fighting platforms, side gates, and beacon towers were built on the Wall.

      Being near the capital of the Ming Dynasty, this section of the Great Wall in Hebei was constructed strongly and with the finest workmanship. So it is the best part of all. Most part of the 7,000 km long Great Wall were built in clays. Only a small part, about 1,000 km, was built in bricks and stones. It is solid and strong and looks magnificent. Of the 1000 km long Great Wall, the big part is located in Hebei. Only a small part, about 200 km, is in the area of Beijing. Though every part of the Great Wall has its unique features, the most important part is in Hebei and the most potential part for the development of tourism is in Hebei. As some of the experts on the Great Wall research say, only when you visit the section of the Great Wall in Hebei, can you feel how dangerously steep, how magnificent and how great the Great Wall is.

      The Great Wall in Hebei possesses many well known scenic spots, such as Laolongtou, where the Great Wall meets the Bohai Sea, the Shanhaiguan Pass, “the First Pass under Heaven”, the Jiaoshan Section of the Great Wall, the first mountain with the Great Wall on it, the Jinshanling Section of the Great Wall, the best section of all, the Jiumenkou Pass, the first pass east of Beijing, and so on.

      The Great Wall of China is the best patriotism education base for the Chinese people. No other historic sites nor natural scenic spots could arouse the Chinese people’s patriotic feelings more than the Great Wall.

      It is because the great walls had played an important role in Hebei and they are well preserved in Hebei that Hebei’s key website The Great Wall Online was proceeded by the term Great Wall. This reflects the strong love of the motherland by the people of Hebei and stresses the local character of Hebei Province as well.

Chinese archaeologists have confirmed after a recent field examination that a 20-km-long section of the Great Wall in north China’s Shanxi province was built in the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

This section is located in Kelan County in northwest Shanxi and is made of stones.

Sources from local archeological departments said that about 20 km of this part of the Great Wall remain, though there are longer ruined portions.

The remaining wall is 1.6 meters wide at the top and the zenith exceeds 3 meters. At some places, 30-cm-high parapet walls can still be seen and many porcelain pieces were scattered nearby.

Before this discovery in Shanxi Province, experts had once thought that no part of the Great Wall was built during the Song Dynasty.

The best-known sections of the Great Wall were built in the Ming Dynasty (13681644) based on construction of previous dynasties. The entire Wall is more than 6,000 km long, running west-to-east from the Jiayuguan Pass in northwest China’s Gansu Province to the Shanhaiguan Pass at the Bohai Sea in north China.

Chinese rulers of ancient times built walls in an attempt to resist intrusions from outside powers. The Great Wall’s construction began during the Warring States Period (475-221 BC), when separate sections were built at scattered strategic areas.

The Great Wall was rebuilt time and again through the centuries, and many sections of it have suffered serious damage from windstorms and water and man-made destruction over the centuries.

Since the early 1980s, the Chinese government has allocated special funds to restore this national monument to its magnificance in some parts, such as the sections at Badaling, Mutianyu, and other sites.

Experts say this latest confirmation will provide adequate material for the Great Wall research and related topics. (Xinhua)

The modern study of the Meng Jiangnü tale begins with the birth in the 1920s of China’s folk song studies (geyaoxue) and folkloric studies (minsuxue) movements. These had their origins in the late-Qing period, but the documentation of China’s folkloric traditions was undertaken as a part of an agenda of national heritage (guogu) studies. Prominent among the early folklorists were pioneers of what were called the New Culture and the Vernacular Literature movements, among whom the most significant figures were Hu Shi, Liu Fu, Zhou Zuoren, Zhong Jingwen and Gu Jiegang. Although these scholars were elitist in their cultural outlook, they were convinced of the primacy of popular and vernacular culture within the overall development of Chinese literature and culture. Their preoccupation with folklore echoed 19th century European developments associated with the rise of nationalism.

In the study of the Meng Jiangnü legend, Gu Jiegang (1893-1980) is the leading figure, and his published studies were described by folklorist Zhong Jingwen as ‘The Analects of folkloric research’.[1] Gu Jiegang is best remembered as one of the creators of a new school of historiography that sceptically examined the textual layering in the written accounts of ancient history. Central to his examination of the role of folklore within history and the broader culture was his extensive research on the legend of Meng Jiangnü. This went back to the winter of 1922 when he took up a teaching position in Peking University’s Department of Guoxue (’National Studies’ or Sinology). In the winter of 1923, he published his seminal paper ‘Meng Jiangnü gushi de zhuanbian’ (The transformation of the story of Meng Jiangnü), and in 1924 Geyao zhoukan (Folksong review) commissioned him to prepare a further paper treating issues associated with the transformation of the legend of Meng Jiangnü. Yet he had not anticipated the wealth of data into which he was tapping; he had only reached the 10th century in his researches when he had already written some 12,000 characters in length. As a result, he had to be content with publishing only the first part of his study in the 69th issue of Folksong review which came off the presses on 23 November 1924 as a special issue devoted to the Meng Jiangnü legend. The article attracted great attention as soon as it appeared, and letters commending the pioneering folkloric work of Gu inundated the journal. Readers from across China also informed the scholar of variants of the Meng Jiangnü legend in various local prose, drama and folk song forms. From Paris, Liu Fu, one of the prime movers of the May Fourth New Culture movement, provided Gu with the texts of the Meng Jiangnü legend that appeared in manuscripts of vernacular literature discovered in the Library Cave at Dunhuang by Paul Pelliot. This unexpected support encouraged Gu to research Meng Jiangnü literature even more fully. In conformity with research as it was then conducted internationally, he isolated mythic themes or universals within the legend as well as particularities of detail, and then outlined a major investigative project with twenty-four topics that examined aspects of the legend through the process of transmission. These topics encompassed the geographical spread of the story, and the particular contours the legend acquired around sites related to the Great Wall, such as the passes at Shanhaiguan and Tongguan, and the northern counties of Tongguan, Xushui and Fengzhou, as well as the unique features the legend assumed in southern China – in Guangdong, Guangxi, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces - far from the Great Wall.

The wide range of topics he set out to explore included the origins of the custom of presenting padded clothing (hanyi), and the expressed belief in the power of lamentation that can topple an unnatural monument. He also examined exegetically the name of Meng Jiangnü against the background of complex practices of female naming in the Warring States. He would eventually show that Meng Jiangnü was a portmanteau term in the Warring States period for a woman of great beauty. [2] In all, Folksong review published nine issues devoted to Meng Jiangnü, presenting not only Gu’s writings but an extensive correspondence and articles on the subject by a number of other scholars and aficionados of folklorica, often with commentary by Gu. This constituted a preliminary round of collective research.

A second round of research was initiated by Gu in June 1925. In this second period he no longer simply examined myths and legends in terms of their themes and elements from a historical perspective, but turned to investigate ancient history in light of what the transformations in legends revealed about history itself. Gu Jiegang now treated the Meng Jiangnü legends as an archaeological artefact, and Gu’s excavation of the text was a decoding of what the transformations in legends signalled about the societies that gave rise to them. For Gu, Meng Jiangnü now had validity less as mythology than as multi-layered sets of ultimately historical texts; his excavation of the embedded structure of the legend in historical texts ultimately became a study of the underlying structure of ancient society itself as viewed through the accretions in bodies of legend.

In 1926 Gu succinctly explained his scholarly approach: ‘There are two tasks I wish to undertake: one is to use the outlook of stories (narrative) to explain the elements that structure ancient history, and the other is to provide a systematic account of ancient and modern myths and legends’. [3] From documenting changes in mythology, he turned to examine why mythology changed.

Meng Jiangnü is a legend which has developed and changed almost beyond recognition. Most modern variants of the folk tale incorporate some of the following elements and themes: the power of passionate mourning to subvert or destroy the man-made order; the tyranny of Qin Shihuang; the Great Wall; the agony of separation; virtuous chastity; unrequited love; and, unparalleled beauty that has the power to devastate.

Unlike many legends, Meng Jiangnü harks back to named historical personages and historical tales. Most scholars follow Gu Jiegang in believing the original Meng Jiangnü to be the wife of the Ji Liang mentioned in a passage in the pre-Qin history Zuo zhuan relating events of the 23rd year of the rule of Duke Xiang, and that the name Ji Liang transformed later into Fan Xiliang, the name of Meng Jiangnü’s husband in the modern version of the legend. The brief passage in Zuo zhuan records that after Ji Liang’s death in battle, his widow could not accept that the Marquis of Qi had held the mourning ceremony for her husband outside the city walls, a form of commemorative service called the ’suburban mourning’ (jiaodiao), and thereby only accorded her the respect due to a concubine, not a wife. Neither the Great Wall nor Qin Shihuang nor Meng Jiangnü appears or is named in this seminal glimpse of the legend. Subsequently, in the text of Tangong, a work of the Warring States period, contained in the ritual text Xiaodai Liji, there is a passage which describes how Ji Liang’s wife ‘received his coffin by the roadside where she wept piteously’.

Lamentation forms the core of the early legend and it is that theme which has enabled researchers to trace the origins of the tale. In the ‘Gaozi, xia’ section of Mencius, the ability of Ji Liang’s wife to weep for her husband ‘changed the customs of the nation’.[4] However, even at this time, the legend was not fully formed because the other important element, the ‘collapsing walls’, had not yet appeared. Gu Jiegang suggested that it was in the Han dynasty, following the articulation by Ying Shao and other philosophers of the theory of the interaction of heaven and man that elements documenting the impact of Meng Jiangnü’s lamentations on the natural (mountains) and man-made order (walls) appeared. In some early versions, the mourning of Meng Jiangnü is to have ‘toppled the mountain’ (bengshan).

In two works of the Western Han dynasty and Wei-Jin period, Liu Xiang’s Shuo yuan and Lienü zhuan, we begin to find the connection between the mourning for the husband of Ji Liang and the collapse of walls. Later, in the Tang dynasty story Tongxian ji (found in the anthology Diaoyu ji [Carving jade]), Meng’s daughter marries a farmer called Ji Liang who has taken refuge on the Meng family estate to avoid being conscripted for hard labour on the Great Wall. After Ji Liang’s death on the Great Wall, Meng Jiangnü’s ‘lamentations toppled the ramparts’ (kudao changcheng). Meng Jiangnü’s name also appears in a Dunhuang ballad (quzici), underscoring the fact that the fully formed legend had emerged by the Tang dynasty.