GREAT WALL OF CHINA.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 25 October 1924, Page 12

GREAT WALL OF CHINA.

OVER FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILE'* LONG. Along the north ini province pi Chihli, Shansi, Shensi, -uui Kansuh stretches the Great Wall uf. thma, to dexend tne co.mtiy again.'.,, aggression, it was begun m the P'jiU century, and in the sixteenth century was extended by 3000 miles Following ail its windings the wall is 1500 miles long. Starting near me seashore at Shanghaikwan, on tne Gulf of L.atung, where, the Chinese and Manchurian frontiers meet, it goes eastward past Pekin (which is abou. 35 miles to the south), and then trends south-east across Shansi to the H w iugho. From about Pekirf to Hwangho there is an inner and an outer wall. The outer, or northern, v. all passes through Kalgan, thus guarding the pass into MongolioJ West of the Hwang-ho the Great Wall the northern frontier of Shensi, and west of Shensi it keeps near 4 the northern frontier of Kansuh. It ends at Kayukwan, just west of Suchow. This part of the wall was built to protect the one main artery leading from central Asia to China through Kansuh and Shensi by the Valley of the Wei-bi, a tributary of the Hwang-ho. The height of the wall is generally from 20ft to 30ft, and at intervals of some 200 yards are towers about 'loft high. Its base is from 15ft + o 25ft thick, and its summit not more than 12ft wide. The wall is carried < ver mountains and valleys, and is places is over 4000 ft above sea-level. Military posts are maintained at the chief gates or passes. At Shanghaikwan. which the Mukden army captured last week, the Kalgan pass, the Yenmun pass, and the Kaiyu pass, through which runs the caravan route to Barkal in Turkestan.

Colonal A. W. S. Wingate, who in the opening years of the twentieth century visited the great wall at over 20 places widely apart, and gathered many descriptions of it in other places, states that its position has been wrongly shown on many maps in a number of places, .while in others it has ceased to exist, “the only places where it forms a substantial boundary being in the valley bottoms, on the passes, and where is crosses main routes. These remarks apply with particular force to the branch running south-west from the Nankow pass, and forming the boundary of Chihli and Shansi provinces.” In Colonel Wingate’s opinion the wall was originally built by degrees and in sections, not of hewn stone, but of round boulders and earth, the different sections being repaired as they fell into ruin. “Only in the valley bottoms and on the passes was it composed of masonary or brickwork,” declares Colonel Wingate. “The Mings rebuilt of solid masonary all those sections through which led a likely road for invading Tartars to follow, or where it could be seen at a distance from the sky-line.”. The building of the wall “was a sufficiently simple affair,” and ]s not to be compared from an engineering point of view with the task of building the Pyramids of Egypt.