A network of wall segments built to protect China's northern boundary, the Great Wall of China is the longest man-made defence structure in the world.
Qin Shi Huang (260 to 210 BC), the emperor who first unified China, ordered the earliest walls to be built. Several dynasties after the Qin added to and rebuilt the Great Wall: the Han (206 BC to 220 AD), Sui (581 to 618), Jin (1115 to 1234) and, most famously, the Ming (1368 to 1644), who constructed most of the stone and brick walls that survive today.
In 1987, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) placed the Great Wall on its list of the world's great national and historical sites, leading to the publication of a book entitled The Great Wall, edited by Ru Suichu.
Its colorful photographs will surprise you with their unexpected perspectives and moods, capturing the vicissitudes of weather, time and human history. The vivid images artfully exclude people, highways, factories, and modern buildings, some of which encroach on and even damage sections of the wall.
By removing the wall from its modern context, the book achieves a timeless quality, but sidesteps important questions about the preservation of historical monuments and the wall's place in modern China.
Still, with its extraordinary visuals and its concise yet thoughtful text, The Great Wall is essential reading for photographers and historians. Travellers who prefer a more compact album should look for The Great Wall, a booklet published by the Foreign Languages Press, Beijing.
In English and Chinese, it has equally spectacular photos of the Ming wall, mainly near Beijing. Both books emphasize the romantic and scenic nature of the Wall.
For his remarkable book, The Great Wall Revisited, photographer William Lindesay gathered old photos of the Great Wall, then took modern photographs from the same vantage points. The result is a book with more than 100 sobering pairs of then-and-now scenes, showing the destruction of many fine portions of the wall, including towers, due to erosion, wars, revolution, and tourism.
In some cases, he found that sections of the wall had disappeared altogether. Lindesay believes his photo comparisons may be the strongest tool to convince authorities to better preserve the monument.
In the text, Lindesay tracks knowledge of the wall in the west, profiling the remarkable William Edgar Geil (1865 to 1925), who pioneered the exploration of different sections of it. Also included are news stories and little-known battle images, taken from the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and 1940s, in which the wall figured prominently.
To get a deeper understanding of the wall, the book The Great Wall: China Against The World 1000 BC to AD 2000 by Julia Lovell, presents the reader with 3,000 years of Chinese history from some new perspectives.
Though China is fond of presenting its history as essentially defensive and non-aggressive, Lovell notes that the walls were not simply meant to defend China from invaders. They were often built for the purpose of retaining territory annexed from the so-called "northern barbarians."
Beginning in the 20th century, the wall has increasingly become a symbol of China, as well as an indicator of the country's sense of self. An informative and entertaining contribution to the history of China's defensive policy and her ideological attitudes, the book will be of interest to readers of Chinese history and international relations. All these books are available from your local libraries.
A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published every Wednesday. Sbirley Chan is a librarian at the Coquitlam Public Library.
