It also became a symbol of ethnic unity, as the correspondence between national identity and Han ethnicity was now made explicit. The symbolic significance of the Wall has allowed Chinese intellectuals of the Post-Maoist era to use it as a proxy to discuss and put into question the consciousness of contemporary Chinese identity. The exhibition and catalog The Wall : Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art curated by art critic Guo Minglu, is one of the most successful efforts in putting together those artistic experiences and showcasing how the Great Wall rhetoric is still alive and relevant in contemporary China.
Functioning as a common theme for the exhibition, the Great Wall of China is a living entity with which the artists communicate. The artist set off to make rubbing a traditional technique similar to frottage, used to take bidimensional impressions from stone carvings through pounding of the Jinshanling section of the Wall. He eventually pieced those prints together to recreate a full size documented copy of the structure.
Even though no compelling evidence has ever been found, popular Chinese folklore kept the myth of the workers buried under the Wall alive for over two thousand years. The myth originated after the supposed purge of books and scholars during the reign of Qin Shi Huang. This thriving atmosphere was brought to an abrupt end in BC when Qin Shi Huang mandated the destruction of books and the alleged burying of scholars in order to establish his favored Legalist school at the expense of Confucianism.
The event has never been fully proven, as its earliest account dates over a hundred years later and comes from Sima Qian BC , the most important historian of ancient China but also a loyal Confucianist. As such, modern historians have been skeptical about the objectivity of his recounting, given his affiliation with the Confucian school.
Despite that, the narrative of the mad and cruel first emperor persisted throughout Chinese imperial history, becoming a recurrent theme in folktales, popular songs, and poetry, most famously in the legend of Lady Meng Jiang and the Great Wall. Meng Jiang was the young spouse of a man constricted to work at the Wall during the Han dynasty.
As winter was approaching, and not having heard from him in a while, she set off to find him to bring him warmer clothes. However, she soon discovered that her husband had died and that his remains were forever buried within the Great Wall of China.
The story of Lady Meng Jiang is one of the most popular folk tales in Chinese culture, circulating in various versions in the past years. Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Legends claim that the earliest rulers in China were the Xia Dynasty, from to B. The original structure stretched more than 70 miles across the northern English countryside from the River Tyne near the city of Newcastle The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to But Wall Street is far more than a location—it has been adopted as a term to describe all U.
It has been portrayed The Qin Dynasty established the first empire in China, starting with efforts in B. The empire existed only briefly from to B.
During the 21st century B. The Ming Dynasty ruled China from to A. Known for its trade expansion to the outside world that established cultural ties with the West, the Ming Dynasty is also remembered for its drama, literature and world-renowned The Tang Dynasty is considered a golden age of Chinese arts and culture.
In power from to A. Beginning of the The Great Wall was continuously built from the 3rd century BC to the 17th century AD on the northern border of the country as the great military defence project of successive Chinese Empires, with a total length of more than 20, kilometers. The Great Wall begins in the east at Shanhaiguan in Hebei province and ends at Jiayuguan in Gansu province to the west.
Its main body consists of walls, horse tracks, watch towers, and shelters on the wall, and includes fortresses and passes along the Wall. The Great Wall reflects collision and exchanges between agricultural civilizations and nomadic civilizations in ancient China. It provides significant physical evidence of the far-sighted political strategic thinking and mighty military and national defence forces of central empires in ancient China, and is an outstanding example of the superb military architecture, technology and art of ancient China.
It embodies unparalleled significance as the national symbol for safeguarding the security of the country and its people. Criterion i : The Great Wall of the Ming is, not only because of the ambitious character of the undertaking but also the perfection of its construction, an absolute masterpiece.
The only work built by human hands on this planet that can be seen from the moon, the Wall constitutes, on the vast scale of a continent, a perfect example of architecture integrated into the landscape.
Criterion ii : During the Chunqiu period, the Chinese imposed their models of construction and organization of space in building the defence works along the northern frontier. The spread of Sinicism was accentuated by the population transfers necessitated by the Great Wall. Criterion iii : That the Great Wall bear exceptional testimony to the civilizations of ancient China is illustrated as much by the rammed-earth sections of fortifications dating from the Western Han that are conserved in the Gansu province as by the admirable and universally acclaimed masonry of the Ming period.
Criterion iv : This complex and diachronic cultural property is an outstanding and unique example of a military architectural ensemble which served a single strategic purpose for years, but whose construction history illustrates successive advances in defence techniques and adaptation to changing political contexts.
Criterion vi : The Great Wall has an incomparable symbolic significance in the history of China. Its purpose was to protect China from outside aggression, but also to preserve its culture from the customs of foreign barbarians. Construction workers were a disposable commodity when it came to building the wall.
Peasants and soldiers forced into labor suffered under terrible conditions , with insufficient food, steep hillsides and brutal weather. Even without factoring in the loss of life, the wall was a massive undertaking. Between the cost of labor, the food and dwellings needed to house workers, and the raw materials, the Great Wall was extraordinarily expensive. Often the Chinese people bore the brunt of these expenses, since the government levied higher taxes to pay for the wall and its repairs.
During the Ming dynasty, repairs on the west end of the wall cost ounces of silver per kilometer, for a total of , ounces. Repairs to the east also required further financing.
Building extensions to the walls themselves were even more costly: in these fortifications were projected to cost over 3. Decorations etched into the Great Wall go back for centuries, including carvings of clouds and lotus blossoms supposedly created by the wives of soldiers constructing the wall under the direction of General Qi Jiguang of the Ming dynasty.
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