50 Fun Facts About Great Wall of China

According to China's 2012 survey, what is the total length of all Great Wall sections and trenches?

21,196 km counts the walls and trenches of every dynasty, which is why it more than doubled the 8,850 km announced three years earlier for the Ming wall alone.

The Great Wall was built mainly to protect against nomadic groups from which region?

The Eurasian Steppe was home to the mounted nomads the wall faced, yet it did quieter work too: its gates let officials control who crossed and tax goods moving through.

Zhao and Yan built early Great Wall sections in which era?

The Warring States period ended in 221 BC when one kingdom conquered the rest; its ruler levelled the walls between the old rivals and kept only the northern ones.

Garrisons on the Great Wall's western stretches guarded merchants and caravans travelling which trade route?

The Silk Road gave the wall a second job: the Han dynasty pushed it west through the Hexi Corridor, a string of desert oases, so that garrisons could shield the caravans.

The Chinese name Wanli Changcheng literally means what?

Ten-Thousand Mile Long Wall was never a measurement: 'ten thousand' here just means countless, as 'myriad' does in English, and each 'mile' is a li of roughly 500 metres.

Besides soldiers and conscripted peasants, which group was marched north to build the First Emperor's Great Wall?

Convicts were sent north under guard from all over China, and so many labourers are said to have died that the wall became a byword for the emperor's harshness.

Sections of the Great Wall in the Gobi Desert are sometimes misleadingly named after which conqueror?

Genghis Khan built no walls or permanent defence lines at all; his armies were the ones getting past China's frontier walls, going around strongpoints rather than besieging them.

General Meng Tian linked older border walls into one barrier on the orders of which ruler?

Qin Shi Huang sent Meng Tian north with a huge army to push back the nomads and build the wall; when the emperor died in 210 BC, a forged decree ordered the general to kill himself.

China's national anthem calls on its people to build a new Great Wall out of what?

Their flesh and blood: the song was the theme of a 1935 film about resisting invasion, and its lyricist was arrested before the composer had set his words to music.

The ancient Great Wall of Qi crosses which coastal province, the home of Confucius?

Shandong was Qi's heartland, and its wall faced south against rival Chinese kingdoms, not northern nomads; a bamboo manuscript given to Tsinghua University in 2008 dates its start to 441 BC.

Which short-lived dynasty, also the builder of the Grand Canal, sent over a million men to build Great Wall defences?

The Sui paid dearly for thinking big: forced labour on walls, canals and failed wars left the people so resentful that rebellion ended the dynasty in 618.

The Ming turned to serious Great Wall building after which 1449 disaster, in which their emperor was captured?

The Tumu Crisis had a strange sequel: freed after a year, the emperor came home to find his brother on the throne, was shut away in a palace, and took the crown back in 1457.

Qi Jiguang, who later strengthened the Great Wall near Beijing, first won fame fighting wokou, pirates named for which country?

Japan gave the wokou their name, though by Qi Jiguang's day most of the crews were probably Chinese; sent north in the 1560s, he added more than a thousand watchtowers to the wall.

In 1988 which performance artist walked half the Great Wall to meet her partner Ulay in the middle?

Marina Abramović and Ulay had planned to marry where they met, but permission took years to arrive and the romance died first, so the walk ended in a goodbye instead of a wedding.

In 1644 Wu Sangui opened Shanhai Pass to which invaders, founders of China's last dynasty?

The Manchus were meant to help Wu Sangui drive rebels out of Beijing; instead they kept the throne, and decades later he led a revolt against the dynasty he had let in.

Why did the Qing dynasty stop maintaining the Great Wall as a border defence?

Their empire now extended beyond it, so the Qing built a different barrier instead: the Willow Palisade, a ditch and bank planted with willows to keep Han settlers out of their homeland.

Which traveller's famous account of his years in China never once mentions the Great Wall?

Marco Polo's silence has fed doubts that he reached China at all, yet the wall we picture today was built some two centuries after his travels.

From which country did Jesuit Bento de Góis travel overland to enter China through the Great Wall in 1605?

India was his starting point: disguised as an Armenian merchant, the Jesuit crossed Afghanistan and the Pamirs to settle whether the fabled 'Cathay' was simply China under another name.

Which fortress in Gansu province marks the western end of the Ming Great Wall?

Jiayu Pass was treated as the edge of the civilised world: exiles and disgraced officials were sent out through its far gate, and many scratched farewell verses inside the archway.

Legend says the designer of the Great Wall's western fortress finished with one spare what?

A single brick, the story goes: pressed by a doubtful overseer to order spares, the designer added just one, and it is still on display at the fort.

Shanhaiguan, the traditional eastern end of the Great Wall, carries what grand title?

First Pass Under Heaven was a title earned by geography: the only easy road from the north-east to Beijing squeezed through a narrow strip here between the mountains and the coast.

The stretch of the Great Wall that runs into the sea at Shanhai Pass is nicknamed what?

Old Dragon's Head makes sense once the whole wall is pictured as a sleeping dragon: its head rests here in the sea, and its tail lies thousands of kilometres away in the western desert.

Which section near Zhangjiakou was the first opened to the public in the People's Republic and is the most visited?

It saw nearly 10 million visitors in 2018, prompting a daily cap of 65,000 the next year.

The Ming Great Wall's eastern end is now placed at Hushan, right beside China's border with which country?

North Korea is the neighbour: once surveys in the late 1980s identified ruins at Hushan, 'Tiger Mountain', official measurements began there instead of at the famous pass on the coast.

Who was the first sitting US president to walk on the Great Wall?

Richard Nixon climbed it in February 1972 and told reporters it 'had to be built by a great people', then added that he wanted no walls of any kind between peoples.

Which restored section north of Beijing, first fortified in the 6th century, lets visitors ride a toboggan back down?

Mutianyu has battlements on both edges of its walkway, a rarity on the Great Wall, so that archers could shoot at attackers on either side.

Great Wall Station, opened by China in 1985 and named after the wall, stands in which remote region?

Antarctica: the research station sits on King George Island, and within a year its crew had bulldozed a road across the peninsula to the Chilean base next door.

In 2007 a global poll named the Great Wall one of the New 7 Wonders of the World alongside which landmark?

Machu Picchu made the seven announced in Lisbon; the other three were finalists that missed out, and the Giza pyramids were given honorary status instead of having to compete.

Which mortar was widely used to hold the bricks of the Ming Great Wall together?

Sticky rice and slaked lime set stronger and more water-resistant than lime alone: chemists found that the rice starch keeps the mortar's crystals small and tightly packed.

How were signals sent between garrisons along the Great Wall?

Smoke or fire from towers did the job: beacons were set on hilltops so each could be seen from the next, letting garrisons warn of enemy movements and summon reinforcements.

Which nomadic confederation was the First Emperor's Great Wall built to hold back in the 3rd century BC?

The Xiongnu had just been driven off the Ordos grasslands by the emperor's army, and the wall was meant to keep them out; soon after his death they simply moved back in.

What did a 2012 survey find had happened to almost 2,000 km of the Ming Great Wall?

It has disappeared, the survey found: wind and rain wore down unprotected stretches, and villagers carted off bricks to build their houses.

Why did Red Guards dismantle parts of the Great Wall?

They saw it as one of the "Four Olds", the old ideas, culture, customs and habits the Cultural Revolution set out to erase, so stretches were quarried and even dynamited for building material.

Which Chinese leader backed the 1980s campaign "Love our China and restore our Great Wall"?

Deng Xiaoping's campaign turned repair into a patriotic cause as China reopened to the world, and within a few years the wall was on UNESCO's World Heritage list.

Whose 1935 poem gave China the saying that those who fail to reach the Great Wall are not true men?

Mao Zedong wrote the line in 'Mount Liupan' as his exhausted army neared the end of the Long March; it is now carved in stone on the wall, and climbers quote it as a dare.

Which Beijing landmark joined UNESCO's list with the Great Wall in 1987?

The Forbidden City arrived in the same first batch because China had only accepted the World Heritage Convention in late 1985, so its greatest monuments were all put forward together.

Which 1932 newspaper feature claimed the Great Wall was visible from the Moon?

Ripley's Believe It or Not! called it 'the mightiest work of man' decades before anyone could check; astronauts who later reached the Moon confirmed the wall cannot be seen from there.

In 2004 astronaut Leroy Chiao took a much-debated photo of the Great Wall from which vantage point?

The International Space Station gave him the view, yet the wall was so faint that Chiao was not sure he had caught it until NASA experts studied the picture.

What did astronaut Yang Liwei say about seeing the Great Wall from orbit?

He had not been able to see it, China's first astronaut admitted after his 2003 flight, and the remark stung enough that the education ministry moved to revise school textbooks that said otherwise.

A 2004 ESA press image said to show the Great Wall from orbit actually showed what?

A river in Beijing's Miyun district had fooled the agency: ESA admitted the mistake, apologised, and said the picture had gone out without proper checking.

What happens when Lady Meng Jiang weeps at the Great Wall for her husband?

Part of it collapses, revealing his bones, in the best-known telling: officials had seized her new husband to labour on the wall, and she had walked north with winter clothes for him.

Since 1999 the Great Wall's Huangyaguan section has hosted which annual race?

A marathon, billed as one of the world's toughest because the course sends runners up and down 5,164 stone steps on the wall itself.

What did explorer William Edgar Geil do in 1908, probably the first American to manage it?

Travel the entire Ming wall: his trek became a book the next year, and a century later the British wall-walker William Lindesay set out to re-photograph the scenes Geil had shot.

An 1899 Denver hoax said Americans would do what to the Great Wall?

Tear it down, ran the story, invented to fill a slow news day; forty years on, a second myth claimed the hoax had sparked the Boxer Rebellion.

What did the traveller Ibn Battuta link the Great Wall to in the 1340s?

The Qur'anic barrier against Gog and Magog is what he took it for, yet by his own account he could find nobody in China who had seen the wall or knew anyone who had.

Which region, crossed by the walls of almost every dynasty, holds the largest share of Great Wall sites?

Inner Mongolia holds nearly a third of the sites, well ahead of Hebei, because the frontier ran through it for two thousand years: early-kingdom, Han, Jin-dynasty and Ming lines all cross it.

Yumen Pass, a Han-dynasty gate on the Great Wall near Dunhuang, is named after which precious stone?

Jade gives the 'Jade Gate' its name, which is said to recall the caravans that carried the stone through it; for centuries this was where travellers left China for the west.

How were unknown stretches of the Ming Great Wall found in 2009?

With infrared range finders and GPS, the mappers traced stretches hidden by hills, trenches and rivers, some of them buried over the centuries by sandstorms.

In 2023 two workers in Shanxi widened a gap in the Great Wall to make what?

A shortcut for an excavator: the pair wanted to cut the distance to a job nearby, and police said the damage they did to the Ming wall could never be undone.

The Ming's 15th-century Liaodong Wall was a simple earth bank protected on both sides by what?

Moats were dug on both sides of a wall of the simplest design, raised from earth to shield Liaodong's farmland and nothing like the masonry ramparts later built near Beijing.