The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC - 2000 AD [Hardcover]

Julia Lovell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 13, 2006

A new and important history of the epic story of the Great Wall of China that guides the reader through the conquests and cataclysms of the Chinese empire, from the second millennium BC the present day. Over 2,200 years old and 4,300 miles long, the Great Wall of China has made an overwhelmingly confident physical statement about the country it spans: about China’s age-old sense of being an advanced civilization anxious to draw a clear line between itself and the “barbarians” at its borders. But behind the wall’s intimidating exterior — and the myths that have clustered around it — is a complex history that has both defined and undermined China. It is this history that Julia Lovell explores in her enthralling book. The Great Wall is an epic tale that stretches over two millennia as it follows the rise and fall of the great Chinese ruling dynasties. Full of astonishing details and extraordinary characters — from emperors to engineers, statesmen to soldiers — this is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand China’s past, present, and future.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

There is no Great Wall of China, argues Lovell, who teaches Chinese history at Cambridge University. Instead, there are many Great Walls—physical, mental, cultural, military and economic—separating China from the outside world. The 4,300-mile-long wall is far more complex than any of the thousands of tourists taking a photo along its famous battlements realizes. Indeed, to the Chinese themselves, their wall has variously signified repression, freedom, security, vulnerability, cultural superiority, economic backwardness, imperial greatness and national humiliation. Still, myths about it abound. Far from it being unbreachable, Chinese emperors relied on the wall only as a last resort to fend off their enemies. (The Ming dynasty, for instance, found it useless against the victorious Manchus, who merely bribed the gatekeepers to let them in.) "As a strategy that has survived for more than two millennia," Lovell writes, "China's frontier wall is a monumental metaphor for reading China and its history, for defining a culture and a worldview...." Lovell tells the gripping, colorful story of the wall up to the present day, including a perceptive discussion of the "Great Firewall"—the Internet, which has replaced nomadic raiders as the most threatening of China's attackers. And no, you cannot see it from the Moon. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Young British historian Lovell narrates the history of China's preeminent national symbol, its Great Wall. Dubious about its defensive efficacy, she points out the fortification's repeated failure to save the dynasty that built it. Apart from its physicality, Lovell is also intrigued by the wall as a metaphor for historical Chinese attitudes toward the exterior world. And driving her wonderful chronicle of the wall is her will to dispel visitors' impressions, shared alike by Richard Nixon and backpacking tourists, that the Great Wall is a continuous construction of great antiquity. Informing readers that though the earliest long walls do date to the Qin dynasty (about 220 BCE), the crenellated, watchtower-crowned marvel of today was built by Ming emperors in the 1600s. Along the way, Lovell instills an appreciation for how the Chinese self-conception of civilized superiority vis-a-vis raiding barbarians of the steppe induced periods of wall-building. Amounting to an overview of imperial and postimperial Chinese history, Lovell's account of the Great Wall is a supremely inviting entree to the country. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (February 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802118143
• ISBN-13: 978-0802118141
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,532,124 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The English view of China, April 21, 2008

By 

usabear "eclectic one" (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC - AD 2000 (Paperback)

An extraordinarily pedestrian and highly derivative (she even uses a secondary source for a biblical quote) walk through the history of China through Lovell's self-imagined vehicle of "The Great Wall". Made even more so as Lovell repeatedly reminds us that the construct "Great Wall" is mainly a Western view. Lovell appears to be curiously ignorant of the philosophical underpinnings of Chinese culture and society, and as a result provides us with an extraordinarily ethnocentric and biased view of Chinese history. She loses no opportunity to belittle or castigate virtually every participant in Chinese history.

While Lovell appears to unflinchingly accept both pejorative views of China's relationship with the world and fanciful descriptions of Chinese customs and culture as described by disenchanted English emissaries, she fails to take into account recent accounts of China's historical trade and interactive relationship with Asia and the rest of the world. Her analysis (using the English 1793 abortive mission as the signature event) leads her to argue that, regardless of whether the Chinese were constructing or not constructing walls; whether they were going on voyages of discovery or trade or restricting travel; whether they were allowing outsiders in or keeping them out; whatever they were doing was proof of her thesis that it was China Against the World. Of the 1793 mission, she comments how the British had to "suffer through hours of Chinese Theatre, being laughed at during banquets for their ineptitude with chopsticks", how their "impressive list of presents submitted to the emperor was rendered into gibberish", and finally of the emperors gifts to the British: "a few auspiciously shaped lumps of jade, boxes of china and lengths of cloth, some of which appeared to be recycled items of tribute from Korean, Muslim and Burmese vassals." Both their, and her, ignorance of Chinese customs and culture could not be more clearly defined. It is unclear how the British emissaries knew their list was being mis-translated, as they could neither speak nor write Chinese. For Lovell to parrot (I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt here, even though she fails to give citations for this view) "auspiciously shaped lumps of jade" without comment is egregious, to say the least. Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with historical China is well aware of the singular importance attached to jade. Of course, at no point are we given what the Chinese view of the mission must have been.

A telling instance of her bias is when she tries to argue that the English instigated Opium Wars were primarily a result of the English desiring free trade. Is it possible that she is unaware of England's Colonial history? Having, or in the process of, colonizing the Indian subcontinent and Burma (for the purpose of opium production and trade), and trying, but failing in their attempts to colonize Tibet and Thailand, England desired to colonize China. Instead they had to settle on providing a safe haven for their drug trade, along with the temporary theft of Hong Kong - the recent return of which to China she particularly laments, equating the return of Hong Kong to Chinese control after 100 years of British Colonialist rule with a symbolic retreat of China to her obtusely-constructed "Great Wall mentality". She even argues that the Crusades provided legitimization for Western (English) utilization of force of arms to gain conquest and concessions from China (and elsewhere). As the Crusades were defeats for the Europeans, this is much like arguing that Vietnam provided the legitimization for the invasion of Iraq.

While she castigates Voltaire's positive assessment of the Great Wall because he never visited the Great Wall, she also castigates those who have visited it and come away with a similar positive assessment, insisting that they could not have seen more than the small portion near Beijing. Woe unto those who do not share her viewpoint - the Jesuits, for example, who she labels "The Jesuit Cult of the Great Wall." (She appears to have a special vendetta against Catholics, including a completely gratuitous and preposterous account of their role in the colonization of the Americas.) On the other hand, she regards those who minimize the status of walls in a favorable light. For example, she appears to regard Daniel Defoe quite highly, despite the fact that he never visited China. Perhaps it's because she subscribes to his fictional view.

A few quotes will serve as defining her attempts to contrast China with the West: "in the contemporary West, where occupation and invasion are, at present, happily the stuff of millennia past, wall-building seems a quaintly old-fashioned idea...", "With the recent notable exception of the invasion of Iraq, for Western powers, committing ground troops in the long term to zones of conflict is a potentially vote-losing last resort.", "Walls and barriers are monuments of a lost, pre-1989 world" If we look at just the period following WWII, we have Korea, Vietnam, Panama, the Falklands, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Northern Ireland, etc., etc. As for Western walls and barriers post-1989; U.S. wall against Mexico, Israel's wall against the Palestinians, the English wall in Northern Ireland and the barriers separating North and South Korea to name a few. As for other barriers, one can easily find a myriad of immigration/emigration restrictions in the West.

A few additional points: Only a colonialist could come up with the descriptive phase "Hong-Kongese" to describe Chinese residents of Hong Kong, or consider the Indian nationalists who opposed English colonialism "radicals".

Wherever does Lovell get her date of 1025 for the beginning of the Zhou Dynasty, as she provides no reference for her chronology of dynasties? I've seen 1122 and 11th C as traditional dates; 1027 as a date accepted until recents years by modern scholars; and 1050, 1046, 1045 and 1040 as the most current years (a rather hot - and sometimes vindictive - debate is going on about which of these current dates is correct), but never 1025.

Lovell says Sun Yixian (Sun Yat-sen, as she calls him) resigned his position as president of the new Republic of China "after barely one year in office." Actually he only served from Jan. 1 to March 12, 1912. Lovell argues that Sun Yixian was no classical scholar (as if she could possibly know) since he adopted the wall as a symbol of Chinese construction and endurance. As his constructs were clearly for public consumption, intended to provide a rallying point for the Chinese, what would she have had him do?

Lovell on Martino Martini, whose Atlas Sinensis she proclaims as being, when they were published, the "most complete and authoritative maps of China to date": his "wild generalizations about the state of the entire wall [were] based , presumably, only on observations of its condition near Beijing." Setting aside her lack of substantive proof of the allegation and that the condition of the wall more than 350 years ago just might have been somewhat different than it is today, would not his maps have the same drawback?

Lovell goes on about how the Qianlong emperor's disdain of the mechanical trinkets brought to him by the English must have been as a result of prior dealings with Europeans having supplied China with earlier mechanical devices. Not possible that the Chinese, in fact, were well aware of such devices due to their own discoveries? Lovell might be surprised to know that the Chinese discovered/invented (just to name a few): quantitative cartography, Mercator-map projection, the first relief maps, Equatorial astronomical instruments, essentials of the steam engine, matches, the mechanical clock, block and mechanical type printing, the decimal system, "zero", the first compasses, dial and pointer devices, magnetic declination of the Earth's magnetic field and the seismograph. All of these hundreds or thousands of years before they were adopted or recognized in the West.

For a parallel, and earlier, book on the Great Wall which Lovell seems to eerily mimic, see Arthur Waldron's The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth.

In sum, I am aghast that Lovell would be actually teaching Chinese history and literature at the University of Cambridge.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One Wall Among Many, September 8, 2006

By 

R. E. Rieder (Corrales NM) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC - 2000 AD (Hardcover)

This book could serve an engaging text for a course in Chinese history. It describes the evolution of that great country tied to its most recognized symbol both as a construction and a thought. Lovell, a teacher of Chinese history and literature at Cambridge handles anecdotes as well as Tom Wolfe. Her prose is so engaging it cries out for colored maps showing different dynasties walls in different colors along with pictures of some of the individuals she describes. The great wall, which is a series of walls spread over a long distance, was intended to wall out the barbarians. Like the Maginot line it was not successful. The Great Wall did not keep Genghis Khan and his successors out. But it had an effect upon the Chinese psyche over much of that country's history. It is a metaphor for China's historical, social and economic isolation.

That the Chinese thought themselves protected, but were walled in, is evident from the British trade mission launched in 1792. Evidently the British were running a trade deficit owing to enormous purchases of tea. George III sent diplomats with extensive gifts on a year long voyage to present their credentials to the Emperor. He received them with a great deal of reserve. Two weeks later the Emperor responded that his country had not "the slightest need of your country's manufacturers." What made the response even more insulting was that it was composed six weeks before the diplomats were shown in. Seventy years later, during the Opium War, the presents were discovered untouched in a stable.

Lovell challenges the perceived singularity of Chinese culture by describing the various walls built from the Warring States period through the Ming dynasty, a period of over 1500 years and the cultural differences during those times. She also asserts that while the wall is long, it is mostly made of mud and not very great. Genghis and his hoard, and later the Manchu's, passed through it with relative ease, testifying to the statement attributed to Genghis that: "the strength of walls depends on the courage of those who guard them." Hundreds of miles long the wall is now mostly rubble, except, of course, for the tourist sections, such as that President Nixon visited. This is in contrast to the various Chinese city walls dating as early as the third millennium B.C. which are now being excavated.

While the long wall is a symbol of the unity of China over millennia, that unity is mostly fiction. So is the assertion that it can be seen from the moon. The walls were built to bar the nomads, the barbarians and the hoards from the North. The Chinese were assumed to be on the defensive. However, while the walls existed, China colonized much of the area south of the Yangtze and the Tibetan plateau.

As Lovell moves from the Shang to the present, she brings to life the builders and destroyers (including nature) of the wall and the economic causes of the ebb and flow of expansion and defense. She writes that her book "has tried to provide a history of the Chinese world view to reveal its successes and failures, to explain an attitude to the outside world that can seem (and, indeed, often is) puzzling, contradictory and strident, and that shows no sign of evanescing in the face of globalization, the Internet and America's world crusade for freedom and democracy." In many ways she has succeeded. This is a captivating book, well written with a mixture of scholarship and accomplished story telling. However, one is left, especially after reading the description of modern life in China in Oracle Bones, with the impression that the world view of the Chinese is changing much faster than Lovell realizes. And that the most recent wall that China has constructed, the one to bar access to portions of the internet, will suffer the same fate as the Great Wall.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars well-defined perspective on Chinese history, April 8, 2006

By 

Jonathan Betz-Zall "Book Bopper" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC - 2000 AD (Hardcover)

A young English scholar interprets much of Chinese history as a struggle between internationalism and isolationism, reflected in the repeated efforts to wall out invaders from the north. Frequently contrasting official rhetoric about the efficacy of the glorious walls with the reality of their constant failures and treasury-draining costs and occasional perspectives from common people, she surprises the reader with accounts of how European and Japanese incursions strengthened the idea of the Great Wall in the Chinese consciousness. By abbreviating specific incidents and omitting character portraits, Lovell successfully compresses almost 4000 years of history into a narrative with very few boring passages. But with so much time to cover, almost no room is left for comparisons with other civilizations. She does mention Israel's fence a couple of times; another interesting comparison would be with the US borders.

Highly recommended as a source of insight into the folly of empire and insularity.