Great Wall of China

THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA | "长城 — The Long Wall of Ten Thousand Li"

The Great Wall of China is the largest human construction project in history — a network of walls, towers, and fortifications stretching over 21,196 kilometers across the mountains and deserts of northern China, built over two thousand years by successive dynasties from the 7th century BCE to the 17th century CE as the defining infrastructure of Chinese civilization's northern frontier. The most photographed sections near Beijing — Mutianyu, Jinshanling, and Badaling — are the best-preserved portions of the Ming Dynasty wall (1368 to 1644 CE), built of fired brick and stone to a width of 4 to 5 meters at the base and stretching along the crest of the Yanshan mountain range in a series of watchtowers, beacon towers, and garrison passes that controlled every mountain crossing between the Mongolian plateau and the North China Plain for three centuries.

The colors are the specific palette of a high mountain fortification: the warm grey of the fired Ming brick turning amber in the late afternoon sun, the deep green of the forest below the wall on the southern slopes, the pale yellow of the dry grass and stone on the northern slopes facing the Mongolian steppe, and the extraordinary sinuous grey line of the wall itself visible from satellite, following the mountain ridgeline in a 21,000-kilometer meditation on the relationship between human ambition and natural topography.