Country Driving [17]
The Great Wall wasn’t a primary reason for the environmental degradation, but undoubtedly it contributed. Everywhere the wall went, it swallowed resources, and the Ming administrators documented the costs of construction. In recent years, an American historian named David Spindler has analyzed the figures for one wall-building project, estimating that for each brick that was fired and set in the wall, soldiers had to burn sixteen and a half pounds of wood. Even in areas where they built the structure out of tamped earth or unquarried stones, they needed wood for cooking fires, and garrison income depended heavily on logging. Spindler’s research shows that during the Ming, only 60 to 70 percent of the wall’s operating budget came from the state, and the rest was made up for by soldiers, often through logging. Some officials complained that this was counterproductive—by stripping the land bare, they only made it easier for horseback raiders.
Four centuries later, the tamped-earth structures seem like the only permanent features on this fluid landscape. I drove past hillsides that had collapsed into ravines, and crop terraces that seemed likely to crumble away tomorrow—but the signal towers still looked ready for war. Their square forms were visible for miles, riding the tops of the terraced hills. Beside the road, one tower had been decorated with a single character: . The word was twenty feet tall, painted in white, and it means “Earth.” Not long after that, I saw another: , “Water.” If the signal towers were sending a message, I wasn’t getting it, so I parked the City Special. Scanning the horizon, I realized that four consecutive towers had been inscribed with characters. Together they created a single sentence that spanned a mile, leaping across rivers and valleys and broken hillsides:
PROTECT WATER, SOLIDIFY EARTH
The line of inscribed towers ended at a huge Ming fort atop a mountain. I followed a side road up to the fort, where the view was stunning. It overlooked a half-dozen valleys, and most hillsides had been pockmarked with thousands of holes that had been dug in order to plant trees. Each pit was two feet across and a few inches deep; depending on the angle of the hillside, they had been carved into squares or crescents. The pits were empty, and they continued as far as the eye could see—a galaxy of holes waiting for new saplings. Another message had been whitewashed across the walls of the Ming fort:
USE THE WORLD BANK’S OPPORTUNITY WISELY HELP THE MOUNTAINOUS AREA ESCAPE FROM POVERTY
Having been constructed to keep the barbarians out, the Great Wall was now welcoming the World Bank. I contacted the local government, to see if somebody could give an introduction to the project, and a cadre agreed to meet me. He was the director of the Youyu County tax bureau, and he told me that over the past two years the local government had received nearly three million dollars in loans from the World Bank. It was one of many projects that the organization sponsored on the loess plateau. Over the years, World Bank loans had funded the construction of mini-dams that conserved water, and their tree-planting campaigns had successfully reduced erosion in many areas. Here in Youyu, they intended to plant pines—all told, the county’s project would cover an area of two hundred and seventy square miles. The director escorted me to a village where earlier antierosion campaigns had been successful. The local Communist Party Secretary told me that now almost every family could