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From WinkyPedia, the free encyclopedia that tells you what you already knew
The Great Wall of China is a series of fortifications across northern China, built, rebuilt and extended over roughly two thousand years. It is a wall in the same sense that the ocean is a puddle: technically, and from a very great distance.[1]
It is not one wall but many walls, built by different states and dynasties, some of them joined together and some of them simply running alongside each other, as walls of a certain age tend to do.
The earliest walls were built by individual Chinese states from as early as the 7th century BC. After China was unified under the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, several existing walls were linked together. Later dynasties added, repaired and abandoned sections according to need, which is why the wall has more beginnings than most walls have bricks.
Most of the stone and brick sections that visitors see today were built during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). These are the parts on postcards. The older, earthen parts are less famous, having spent the last two thousand years quietly being a wall without being asked to pose.
A national survey whose results were announced in 2012 measured every branch of the wall and arrived at a total of about 21,000 kilometres.[2] Because the figure adds together every branch, spur and parallel section, it is considerably longer than the distance from one end of the wall to the other, which has caused some disappointment among people who set out to walk it.
The wall was built along ridges and over mountains wherever possible, on the sound engineering principle that a wall on top of a mountain is a taller wall for the same amount of wall.
It is often said that the Great Wall is the only human-made structure visible from the Moon. It is not visible to the naked eye from the Moon. The claim has nonetheless been repeated in a great many books, none of which were written on the Moon.[3]