Great Wall of China :: Chinese China History

commodious W each of ChinaIn the year 221 B.C.E., there was a extensive ruler over the Chin kingdom in China, named Shih Huang Ti. Shih was power hungry and wanted more land so he gathered his army and captured the environ kingdoms. As the ruler of so many kingdoms he became the first emperor of China. Shih showed his tyranny when he burned all history books to insure that his plurality and future generations would only remember him and none of the earlier rulers. He had a strong army but the fierce tribes north of China, the Mongols and the Huns, were stronger. These nomadic tribes would incur into China and steal crops and animals and then destroy everything left behind.Shih was very affect with these invasions, so in the year 214 B.C.E. he freed prisoners and gathered workers and herds of animals. He gave all this to Meng Tien, his loyal general. Meng and the men and animals were sent north to fortify Shihs kingdoms from invading armies. Shih mean to make a great ring by extending and enlarging preexisting walls make by previous rulers. This great wall would serve as a barricade to keep out all tribes that wanted to invade China. It to a fault served to separate the civilized acts of the farmers in China to the barbaric acts of the nomadic tribes. What Shih did not know was that the construction would cause many deaths and much suffering to the builders of the wall. The wall which Meng and his men created had watchtowers, forty feet tall, every two hundred yards. The purpose of these towers was to spruce the defending soldiers of approaching, attacking tribes. The soldiers at the towers signalled to each other by twenty-four hour period using smoke signals, waving flags, blowing horns, and ringing bells by night by lighting firework-like objects in the sky. The wall, itself, was approximately fifteen hundred miles long, thirty feet mettlesome and, at the base, twenty-five feet thick. It was made of the core of earth and gravel. Actually, it was two walls align with each other and then filled in with a cavity base pounded smooth. The wall traveled over mountains and through valleys. It went from Liatun, on the brim near Korea, westward to the northern end on the Yellow River, mho to Lintao to close off the north west area of the empire from the Huns.