Who Built the Great Wall of China?

With more than 13,000 miles of human-made and natural barriers, the Great Wall of China was constructed and reconstructed over the course of more than two millennia. The wall represents the vision, planning and hard labor of millions of people, from emperors and senior civil servants to the soldiers, peasants and prisoners who pounded earth and laid brick and stone to build its barriers.

Carlos Rojas, a professor of Chinese cultural studies at Duke University and the author of The Great Wall: A Cultural History, says that the individual leaders most responsible for the Great Wall as we know it today might include a nation-unifying emperor from the third century B.C., a border-fortifying Ming Dynasty sovereign or even a late-20th-century Communist modernizer. But, he says, “the best answer to the question of who built the Great Wall of China is that it is the result of countless overlapping efforts and has no single creator.”

The Great Wall’s first widely credited builder is Qin Shihuang, the emperor who united most of China for a short-lived dynasty, from 221 to 206 B.C. In 215 B.C., Qin ordered his general Meng Tian to take more than 100,000 soldiers to his empire’s northern frontier to build a “long wall,” writes first-century B.C. historian Sima Qian, “stretching over a distance of more than 10,000 li” (roughly 3,100 miles).

But the Qin emperor was not the first to build walls in the region in question, nor did the walls he build bear any resemblance to brick and stone walls we know today. Instead, the early walls were made using a tamped earth technique, where layers of soil and gravel were packed tightly between temporary wooden barriers.

Wall-building was backbreaking work, and over the centuries, folk tales arose about dead workers being buried in the wall, although no physical evidence supports these stories. One famous tale recounts the story of Meng Jiangnü, whose husband was sent north to work on the Qin wall. She journeys to see him, only to learn he has died. Her tears cause a section of the wall to collapse, revealing his bones so she can take them home for burial.

Even after the Qin emperor was dead and buried in his tomb, guarded by terracotta soldiers, his wall left a lasting impression. During the subsequent Han Dynasty, both Chinese rulers and their northern neighbors viewed Qin’s “long wall” as an important boundary between empires and cultures.

Over the centuries, various emperors engaged in localized wall-building projects, and the idea of the “long wall” persisted. A stone map of China carved during the Song Dynasty in 1040 depicts the Great Wall as it had never physically existed: a single structure stretching from inner Mongolia to the Gulf of Bohai. (Centuries later, the first modern European map of China would do the same.)

Much of the Great Wall as it stands today dates to the 276-year-long Ming Dynasty, which began in 1368, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. Construction of the earliest Ming additions to the Great Wall began in the west, with traditional packed-earth fortifications. By the mid-1500s, the Jiajing Emperor, Zhu Houcong, increased wall-building further to the east, with a focus on more durable and elaborate stone battlements snaking up and down the steep terrain north of Beijing.

But even these iconic Ming fortifications were less the product of any single emperor’s unified plan than a set of distinct projects carried out under different rulers in response to changing circumstances along China’s northern borders. Though much is known about the generals and civil servants who directed key sections, relatively few records remain from the laborers who built the Ming sections of the Great Wall. As with earlier constructions, they were likely a mix of soldiers, conscripts, prisoners and peasants, although the Ming fortifications required an additional cadre of skilled masons.

Although the Ming Wall partly retraced Qin’s 3,100-mile-long barrier, Ming leaders rarely referred to it as a “long wall,” preferring instead to describe their projects as “border walls” or garrisons—perhaps to avoid referencing the legendary human cost of the Qin wall.

Despite its durability, the Ming wall, like its precursors, was hardly impenetrable. Raiders attacked at unfortified sections, and the dynasty was finally toppled in 1644, after a Ming general allowed the Manchu army to pass through the Great Wall at Shanhai Pass en route to Beijing.

The Manchu invaders became the new rulers, establishing the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until 1912, when the last emperor abdicated. Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China, wrote in 1919 to reflect on how the Great Wall had shaped his nation’s history: “If we Chinese hadn’t enjoyed the protection of the Long Wall, China would not have flourished and developed as it did,” Sun wrote.

With the rise of Communism, the Great Wall was once again remade as a metaphor suited to its rulers. In the mid-1930s, during Mao Zedong’s power-consolidating Long March, the playwright Tian Han wrote in the “March of the Volunteers,” which would eventually become China’s national anthem, “With our very flesh and blood, let us build our new Long Wall.”

In the 1950s, the poet-turned-bureaucrat Guo Moruo presented the first modern proposal to restore sections of the Great Wall, focusing on repairing the Badaling section outside Beijing, which was opened to tourists in 1957.

In 1984, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping implored citizens to “love our country and restore the Great Wall.” His campaign had the dual purpose of restoring elements of the Ming-era structure while reaffirming the Great Wall as a symbol of national unity. When sections of the Great Wall were used for events in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the structure’s symbolic journey—from a barrier excluding outsiders to a symbol of welcome—seemed to have come full circle.

“As a physical structure, the Wall—or, rather, the various mural fortifications known collectively as the Great Wall—have been repeatedly built and rebuilt over a period of more than two millennia,” Rojas says. “The secret of the Wall’s longevity and its current status as a global icon is that it means different things to different people.”