The Earliest "Great Wall"? The Long Wall of Qi Revisited.

AuthorPines, Yuri
PositionEssay

The Great Wall is arguably the most famous human building worldwide, and is also the most famous symbol of China. Erection of long walls was not exceptional to China, of course: Hadrian's Wall in Britain or the less famous Sasanian Great Wall of Gorgan immediately come to mind. (1) Yet nowhere can long walls be compared to those in China in terms either of their combined length, or of investment of human and material resources, or of their symbolic value, or of their historical persistence. Recall that in China long walls were constructed for more than twenty centuries, counting from the Warring States period (Zhanguo [phrase omitted], 453-221 BCE) to the last decades of the Ming [phrase omitted] dynasty (1368-1644), that their combined length well exceeds twenty thousand kilometers, and that they cross no less than fifteen provincial-level units of the People's Republic of China. (2) Add to this the much-debated symbolic value of the Great Wall: all this explains why China's "Great Wall" (or, more accurately "long walls") (3) continue to fascinate scholars and laypersons alike. (4) Yet despite the remarkable advancement of historical and archeological research, many questions remain unanswered. Among these, the issues related to the origins of the long wall tradition figure prominently. When and how did the idea of lengthy walls running for hundreds of kilometers come into existence? What prompted their erection? And what was their military and non-military impact?

In what follows I want to tackle some of these questions by focusing on a single case of an early long wall: that of the state of Qi [phrase omitted]. My selection of Qi as the major case study is not fortuitous. Newly unearthed paleographie materials provide precious evidence about the origins of the Qi Long Wall, and this wall is also among the best studied archeologically. These new data can be synthesized with the scattered--and often confusing--evidence in the received texts to provide new crucial clues as to the origins and functions of early long walls. Even though some of the new data add to confusion rather than provide neat solutions to every question, the cumulative information attained from textual, paleographie, and material sources advances our knowledge considerably.

I shall start my discussion with a brief survey of textual information about the erection of the Long Wall of Qi, then introduce the new paleographie evidence and utilize it and the archeological data to clarify issues of the Wall's origins and of its route. From there I shall proceed to a broader analysis of the Long Wall of Qi in the context of the military, economic, and administrative history of the state of Qi and, more generally, of the Warring States-period Chinese world. Finally, in the epilogue I shall briefly compare the Long Wall of Qi and that of Chu [phrase omitted], which rivals the Qi Wall as a candidate to be the earliest long wall on Chinese soil.

THE LONG WALL OF QI: TEXTUAL SOURCES

The Warring States-period texts contain several references to the Long Wall of Qi. The Stratagems of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce [phrase omitted]) twice cite an almost identical depiction of Qi's advantageous topography: "the clean Ji and muddy [Yellow] River suffice to serve as an impediment; the great barrier of the Long Wall suffices to serve as a fortification" [phrase omitted]. (5) Putting aside the thorny question of these speeches' historical reliability, we may observe that their geographical data should reflect the situation of Qi as viewed by late Warring States-period observers. Both speeches pair the major rivers that protected Qi from the west and northwest (the Yellow and the Ji [phrase omitted] River), with the "great barrier of the Long Wall," presumably the southern boundary of Qi. Evidently, the Long Wall was considered as potent a hurdle against potential invaders as the two major water arteries.

We shall return later to the issue of the Long Wall's military value; but first, let us ask: when was it first erected? Here the received texts produce a confusing picture. The earliest possible date of the Qi Wall construction is presumed to be during the reign of Lord Huan of Qi [phrase omitted] (r. 685-643 BCE), since the existence of the Wall between Qi and Lu is mentioned in the "Qing zhong D" [phrase omitted] chapter of the Guanzi, a text attributed to Lord Huan's advisor, Guan Zhong [phrase omitted] (d. 645 BCE). (6) Not a few Shandong-based scholars, who want to ensure Qi's priority as the first builder of a Long Wall in Chinese (or global) history, accept this as a proof of the wall's precedence. (7) Yet as many critical scholars have noticed, there is a broad agreement that Guanzi in general, and its "Qing zhong" chapters in particular, could not have been composed before the Warring States period (if not later). Like many other chapters of Guanzi, these chapters reflect a Warring States-period situation imposed backwards on Lord Huan and Guan Zhong's times without much consideration of historical veracity. Consequently, the Guanzi evidence can be dismissed. (8)

Another contested piece of evidence is the Zuo zhuan [phrase omitted] record of the Jin [phrase omitted] invasion of Qi in 555 BCE. The relevant passage is translated and analyzed below; here suffice it to say that it mentions a battle at a Qi fortification which was stormed by Jin and its allies. This fortification is identified in the Annotated Canon of Waterways (Shuijing zhu [phrase omitted] as referring to the Qi Long Wall. (9) For not a few scholars this appears to be the earliest firm evidence for the existence of Qi's Long Wall. (10) The proponents of this view do not explain, however, why the term "long wall" never appears in Zuo zhuan, which actually never refers to other fortifications along the Qi-Lu border.

Two other pieces of evidence place the construction of the Qi Wall in a decidedly later period. The Annotated Canon of Waterways cites an entry from the Wei SI chronicle, the Bamboo Annals (Zhushu jinian [phrase omitted], according to which the Long Wall of Qi was erected in the twentieth year of King Hui of Wei ([phrase omitted], r. 369-319 BCE), i.e., in 350 BCE. Confusingly, however, the next phrase in the Annotated Canon of Waterways refers to another entry from the Bamboo Annals, which mentions the penetration of the Long Wall of Qi by the invading Jin armies in the twelfth year of Lord Lie of Jin [phrase omitted] A (r. ca. 416-389), i.e., in 404 BCE. (11) To aggravate the confusion, a seventh-century CE gloss to the Records of the Historian (Shiji [phrase omitted] [phrase omitted]) quotes a lost text, Qi Records (Qi ji [phrase omitted]), which attributes the construction of the Long Wall to King Xuan of Qi [phrase omitted] (r. 319-300 BCE). Thus we have two pieces of evidence that date the Wall to post-350 BCE, which are contradicted by several other references, including one in the Bamboo Annals entry cited above, another in the Records of the Historian, and yet another in Lushi chunqiu [phrase omitted], which mention penetrations of the Long Wall of Qi by its enemies in the late fifth century BCE and again in 368 BCE. (12)

How to reconcile these confusing references? An elegant solution was proposed by Zhang Weihua [phrase omitted], who prepared the most systematic survey of textual references to the Qi Wall. Zhang averred that different sections of the Long Wall were constructed in different periods: first came the western section near Mt. Tai (Taishan [phrase omitted]) and the Ji River, where fortifications were erected already in the sixth century BCE, then the eastern section near the sea, and finally the central section after the conclusion of which the single Long Wall stretching from the Ji River to the Eastern Sea was finalized (see Map l). (13) As we shall see below, this suggestion is not entirely accurate: new paleographie evidence, unknown to Zhang Weihua, suggests that the Wall was constructed in its entirety as a single project. Yet Zhang's views surely have their strong points: it is quite possible that various entries in the Bamboo Annals refer to repeated reconstructions, renovations, or alterations of the Long Wall's course, even if not necessarily to its piecemeal construction. I shall revisit some of Zhang's suggestions later, but first let us turn to the new evidence.

PALEOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE:

XINIAN AND THE PIAOQIANG BELLS

In 2008, Qinghua (Tsinghua) University announced the acquisition of a large number of bamboo slips allegedly looted from a Chu tomb in Hubei or Hunan, then smuggled to Hong Kong and acquired there. (14) The publication of these slips is still ongoing (as of 2018). For the purpose of the current discussion, the most significant part of the collection is a historical text named by the editors Xinian [phrase omitted]. This is by far the largest and best preserved historical text from among the so far discovered and published pre- and early imperial manuscripts. (15) The text in twenty-three sections (zhang [phrase omitted]) covers the history of the Zhou [phrase omitted] world from the founding of the Zhou dynasty in ca. 1046 BCE to the early years of the fourth century BCE. It focuses on fluctuations of inter-state relations during these centuries, specifically wars and alliances of the state of Chu and of its major rival, the state of Jin. Judging from its content, Xinian was in all likelihood produced in the state of Chu, ca. 380-370 BCE. Since I have discussed Xinian, its nature, dating, and authenticity elsewhere, (16) I shall focus here only on the topics relevant to the Long Wall of Qi.

The four last sections of Xinian (#20-23) are highly precious for historians of pre-imperial China. These sections cover the period of ca. 450-395 BCE, which falls in between the Zuo zhuan and Guoyu [phrase omitted] narrative on the one hand and the bulk of the Warring States-period sources on the other. The text narrates in...

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