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By Root 3910 0

Wall: supposedly, a single structure of brick and stone, two thousand years old, that stretches across China as neatly as a marking on a map—. In 1793, an Englishman named Sir John Barrow visited the wall near Beijing, extrapolated from what he saw, and declared that the nationwide structure contained enough stone to build two smaller walls around the equator. (He didn’t realize that walls in the west are smaller and made of tamped earth.) In 1923, National Geographic Magazine claimed that the Great Wall is visible to the human eye from the moon. (In truth, nobody on the moon could see it in 1923, and they still can’t.) For a while, Chinese intellectuals tried to resist such exaggerations, believing rightly that the foreigners had confused both history and geography. But eventually the myths proved appealing to nationalists like Mao Zedong, who used the Great Wall in propaganda, recognizing the symbolic value of a unified barrier. In any case, it was hard to set the record straight in a country with no academic tradition of studying the ancient structures. Finally it was as if the Chinese threw up their hands and accepted the foreign notion: nowadays there’s even a single term, Changcheng, literally “long wall,” which has been adopted as the catchall equivalent of “Great Wall.”

The only Chinese studying the Great Wall do so outside of academia. In Beijing, small communities of amateur historians try to combine fieldwork with textual research, and occasionally in the provinces there’s somebody like Old Chen. He told me that eventually he hoped to find a provincial publisher for his book. After he showed me his writings, and the artifacts that he had collected, he offered to take me out to see the local walls.

We climbed into the City Special and drove north along a dirt road. A couple of miles outside the village, we stopped and Old Chen led me through a high valley of scrub grass. He walked slowly, with the thoughtful pose that’s common among men in the countryside: head down, hands clasped behind his back. He stopped at a distinct grass-covered ridge.

“That’s from the Northern Wei,” he said, referring to a dynasty that ruled this region from AD 386 to 534. Over the centuries the structure had been worn down by wind and rain, until now it was nothing more than a two-foot-tall bump stretching northeast across the hills. It was intersected by another ridge so faint that I wouldn’t have seen it without his help. “That’s the Han wall,” he said. It was even older: the Han ruled from 206 BC to AD 220. High in the hills, a third wall dated to the Ming. The Ming fortifications were six feet tall and ran clear to both horizons, east and west. In this landscape of ancient barriers, the Ming wall was a relative newcomer—only four centuries old.

“Over the years, I saw these things so many times, until I finally got curious,” Old Chen explained. “Where did they come from? What was the system behind it? That was my main reason for starting the research.”

I drove him back to his home, where we had another cup of tea. He explained that the village name had been shortened from Ningxi Hulu, which means “Pacify the Hu.” In ancient times, hu was a term used by the Chinese to describe the nomadic peoples of the north. It wasn’t specific to a certain tribe or ethnicity, and it was derogatory—a slur that encompassed all outsiders. The final character, lu, was even blunter: “barbarians.”

“Basically, the name of our village means ‘Kill the Foreigners,’” Old Chen said with a smile. “Look at this.” He opened my book of Sinomaps and pointed out another village ten miles to the east: Weilu, or “Overawe the Barbarians.” Nearby was the town of Pohu: “Smash the Hu.” Other villages were called “Overawe the Hu,” “Suppress the Barbarians,” and “Slaughter the Hu.” Modern maps use the character for hu that means “tiger”—a substitution first made during the Qing dynasty, whose Manchu rulers were sensitive to the portrayal of people from outside the walls. But the change was cosmetic, and the original meaning is still as obvious as the old forts that tower