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Walking the Wall.(Great Wall of China)
The New Yorker May 21 , 2007
When the weather is good, or when I\'m tired of having seven million neighbors, I drive north from downtown Beijing. It takes an hour and a half to reach Sancha, a quiet village where I rent a farmhouse. The road dead-ends at the village, but a footpath continues into the mountains. The trail forks twice, climbs for a steep mile through a forest of walnut and oak, and terminates at the Great Wall of China.
Once, I packed a tent, hiked up from the village, and walked eastward atop the wall for two days without seeing another person. Tourists rarely visit this area, where the wall is perched high along a ridgeline, magnificent in its isolation. The structure is made of stone, brick, and mortar; there are crenellations and archer slits, and guard towers that rise more than twenty feet high. The tallest one is known locally as the Great Eastern Tower, and just before it an inscribed marble tablet sits on the wall. Originally, there were many such tablets, but this is one of fewer than ten that are known to remain on the wall in the Beijing region. The inscription notes that in 1615 A.D. a crew of two thousand four hundred soldiers built a section of the wall which was fifty-eight zhang and five cun long. That\'s about six hundred and fifty feet, and the bureaucratic precision of the inscription, in this forgotten place, seems as lonely as words can be.
In November of 2005, I hiked to the Great Eastern Tower with two friends who were visiting from New York. After reaching the tower, we began the long descent to the south. This stretch can be treacherous: many of the brick ramparts have collapsed. I was picking my way downhill when something in the rubble caught my eye. It was white--too white to be brick, too big to be mortar. I dug it out and saw four neat rows of carved characters.
It was a fragment of another marble tablet. I could make out some of the words: something was six chi high, and something else was two zhang. But the writing was in classical Chinese, which I\'ve never studied, and the surface was badly scarred.
"How long do you think it\'s been buried here?" one of my friends asked.
"I have no idea," I said. But I knew one person who might be able to tell me. My friends and I covered the artifact with loose bricks, and I memorized the location. A month later, I returned with David Spindler.
David Spindler stands six feet seven, and he is reserved in a way that is characteristic of many men who are very tall and thin. For years, I\'d seen him occasionally at social gatherings in Beijing, where he always seemed to make sure that he was sitting down. He is thirty-nine years old, with short sandy hair, a long face, and gentle eyes. He chooses his words very carefully. Since 2002, he has worked full time as an independent scholar of the Great Wall, and although he has no academic affiliation or outside funding, he has become one of its leading researchers.
On a cold December morning, Spindler and I set off to find the marble tablet. In the city, everything about his appearance had seemed chosen to avoid attention. But in the mountains he wore a red-checked wool hunting shirt, a floppy white Tilley safari hat, high-end La Sportiva mountaineering boots, and large elk-leather gloves designed for utility-line workers by J. Edwards of Chicago. He looked like a scarecrow of specialty gear--some limbs equipped for hard labor, others for intense recreation. Over the years, Spindler had determined that this was precisely the right ensemble for the Great Wall, where thorns and branches are common. For a face mask, he\'d cut a leg off a pair of sweatpants, scissored a round hole, and pulled it over his head. ("It covers your neck.") He wore polyurethane-coated L. L. Bean hunting trousers that had been reinforced by his neighborhood tailor. Denim patches covered the pants, like a friendship quilt linking Freeport and Beijing.
We followed the wall east. Every hundred yards or so, it connected to a tower. These structures were crumbling but still impressive, with high vaulted ceilings and arched windows. Periodically, Spindler pointed out details: a place where a door used to be barred, a brick frame that had once held an inscribed tablet.
"The towers and the wall were totally different projects," he said. "First, you had the brick towers, and the wall was just local stone. And then they came and improved the wall. That\'s why these towers look a little funny."
He pointed out a place where the wall\'s crenellation ran into the open window of a tower--the kind of thing that happens when you use two different contractors. Near the Great Eastern Tower, one section of wall had fallen down entirely. Spindler believed that the construction project of 1615 had ended right there, at the edge of a short precipice. He had measured it once, using the details found on the marble tablet near the tower. "These guys really hosed the next construction crew," he said. "What could they do? It\'s really hard to build from that point."
I had hiked this section perhaps fifty times, but I had never noticed the details of construction. In my mind, it was simply the Great Wall--complete and virtually timeless. For Spindler, though, it was a work of pieces and seasons. Construction generally took place in the spring, when the weather was good but Mongol raiders weren\'t active. "Energy in the Mongol world was fat on the horses," Spindler said. "They didn\'t have that after the winter, so the spring was not a good season for raiding. Summer was too hot. They didn\'t like the heat; they didn\'t like the insects. The Mongol bowstrings were made of hide, and with the humidity they supposedly went flat--this is described in Ming texts. Most raids took place in the fall."
We came to the smashed tablet, and he crouched in the cold, running a finger along the carved characters. He recognized it immediately as a piece of a tablet that dated to 1614. The county antiquities bureau had recorded its inscription in 1988, but not its original location on the wall, and since then it had disappeared. Some looter had probably broken it.
"It\'s saying the height of the wall, including the crenellations," he explained. "And then it starts in with all the names of the officials. God, it\'s good that somebody got this down before it was destroyed."
Spindler took a tape measure to the fragment, calculated the space between lines, and quickly computed the original dimensions. Slowly, he walked back along the wall, looking for a place where it could have been mounted. He measured an empty brick-bordered ledge: perfect fit. For this small section of the wall, he now knew the basic story of two construction campaigns in the sixteen-tens. Before leaving, we returned the fragment to the spot where I had found it.
While we were there, a peasant hiked up from the south. He was trapping game; a dozen wire snares were looped over his shoulder. If the presence of a six-foot-seven foreigner in a floppy hat and elk-leather gauntlets surprised the man, he didn\'t show it. He asked if we had extra water, and Spindler gave him a bottle. During the following year, Spindler and I hiked through several villages together, and each time locals hardly seemed to distinguish between the two of us. Andrew Field, a friend of Spindler\'s who teaches Chinese history at the University of New South Wales, once told me that an unusually tall person might feel more comfortable here than in America. "In China, sure, he\'s a monster," Field said. "But aren\'t we all?"
In 221 B.C., Qin Shihuang became the first ruler in Chinese history to declare himself emperor. After consolidating power, he commanded the construction across the north of roughly three thousand miles of changcheng. The term translates as either "long wall" or "long walls"--Chinese doesn\'t differentiate between singular and plural--and the barriers consisted of hard-packed earth. Over the centuries, many other dynasties faced the same basic problem as the Qin: the wide-open frontier of the northern plains made them vulnerable to the nomadic Mongol and Turkic tribes that inhabited these lands. The nomadic threat was more intense in some periods than in others, and Chinese dynasties responded with different strategies. The Tang, who ruled from 618 to 907 A.D., built virtually no walls, because the imperial family was part Turkic and skilled in Central Asian warfare and diplomacy. Even when dynasties constructed walls, they didn\'t necessarily call them changcheng; more than ten terms were used to describe the fortifications.
The Ming usually called theirs bianqiang--"border wall(s)"--and they became the greatest wall builders in Chinese history. They came to power in 1368, after the collapse of the Yuan, a short-lived Mongol dynasty that had been founded by Kublai Khan. The Ming constructed
large fortifications of quarried stone and brick in the Beijing region--these are the iconic structures (some of them rebuilt and restored) that seem to continue endlessly in tourist photographs. They were the only dynasty to build extensively with such durable materials, and many sections of Ming wall ran for miles. But the bianqiang was a network rather than a single structure, and some regions had as many as four distinct lines of fortifications.
In 1644, domestic rebels stormed the capital, and the Ming emperor committed suicide. In desperation, a military commander in the northeast opened a major bianqiang gate to the Manchus, a northern tribe, in the hope that they would restore the ruling family. Instead, the Manchus founded their own dynasty, the Qing, which lasted until 1912. The Qing had little use for the walls, which were abandoned to the elements.
As Western explorers and missionaries began to penetrate China in the eighteenth century, they toured the Ming ruins and confused them with stories of Qin Shihuang\'s three-thousand-mile wall. Foreigners assumed that the Beijing region\'s trellised brick fortifications were part of an unbroken line that had stretched across the north for two thousand years. In 1793, an Englishman named Sir John Barrow saw a section of wall near Beijing and, extrapolating from its measurements, declared that the entire structure must have contained enough stone to build two smaller walls around the equator. (Westerners rarely visited China\'s west, where most walls were made of tamped earth.) At that time, foreigners usually called it "the Chinese wall," but by the end of the nineteenth century, as the exaggerations accumulated, it had become the Great Wall of China. In February of 1923, a National Geographic article began, "According to astronomers, the only work of man\'s hands which would be visible to the human eye from the moon is the Great Wall of China." (It wasn\'t visible from the moon in 1923, and it still isn\'t.)
Eventually, the misconceptions made their way back to China. Under threat of foreign domination, leaders like Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong realized the propaganda value of a unified barrier. Changcheng became the equivalent of "the Great Wall," a term that encompassed all northern fortifications, regardless of location or dynastic origin. It delineated what was, essentially, an imaginary structure--a single, millennia-old wall.
Today, the concept of the Great Wall is so broad that it resists formal definition. When I met with scholars and preservationists in Beijing, I asked how changcheng should be defined, and I never heard the same thing twice. Some said that in order for a structure to qualify as part of the Great Wall it had to be at least a hundred kilometres long; others believed that any border fortification should qualify. Some emphasized that it had to have been built by ethnic Chinese, whereas others included walls built by non-Chinese tribes. Nobody could give an accurate length estimate, because there has never been a systematic survey. Last year, various articles in China Daily described the Great Wall as thirty-nine hundred miles, forty-five hundred miles, and thirty-one thousand miles long.
There isn\'t a scholar at any university in the world who specializes in the Great Wall. In China, historians typically focus on political institutions, while archeologists excavate tombs. The Great Wall fits into neither tradition, and even within a more discretely defined topic--say, the Ming wall--there\'s almost no scholarship. The fortifications have been poorly preserved, and in the past many sections of low-lying wall were plundered for building materials, especially during the Cultural Revolution. In the nineteen-eighties, a Harvard Ph.D. student named Arthur Waldron became interested in the relationship between Chinese and nomadic groups. "So I went to the library and thought I would find a big book in Chinese or maybe Japanese that would have everything about the Great Wall," he told me recently. "But I didn\'t. I thought that was strange. I began to compile a bibliography, and after a while I said, \'This does not add up to the image that we have.\' "
In 1990, Waldron published "The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth." Drawing on Ming texts--he didn\'t conduct significant field research--Waldron described key aspects of wall building during that dynasty. He also identified many modern misconceptions about the wall, including the notion that it\'s a single structure. It was a breakthrough book, and one that should have provided a foundation for further scholarship. But since then there hasn\'t been another work of significant new archeological or historical research, apart from one Chinese book by a surveying team that describes a six-hundred-mile series of Ming fortifications in the east. (Another book, published last year, "The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 B.C.-A.D. 2000," by Julia Lovell, a fellow at Cambridge, is primarily concerned with exploring the wall as a symbol for the Chinese world view. She draws a parallel, for example, between the ancient wall and the current government\'s Internet firewalls.)
In China, one of the best-known experts, Cheng Dalin, is not an academic but a retired photographer. For more than twenty years, Cheng specialized in taking pictures of the wall for the Xinhua News Service. In his spare time, he studied history, and he has published eight books, combining photographs and research. "The Great Wall touches on so many subjects--politics, military affairs, architecture, archeology, history," he told me. "Within each specialty, it\'s too small. And taken as a whole it\'s too big. You have to find little bits in so many different books; it\'s not concentrated in one place. And nobody will pay you! How will you eat? How can a person spend ten years reading all these books?"
本帖由 carmen 于2008-04-10 23:43:51发表
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