Who built the Great Wall of China, why, and how: from the Qin emperor to the Ming brick wall, and what is myth

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Great Wall of China was built by several Chinese dynasties over more than two thousand years, beginning with the walls of the Warring States in the 7th century BC, joined and extended by the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang from 221 BC, pushed west by the Han in the 2nd century BC, and rebuilt in stone and brick by the Ming dynasty between 1368 and 1644, which is the wall of the photographs near Beijing. Its purpose was to keep out the horsemen of the northern steppe, the Xiongnu and later the Mongols, and to control who crossed and traded; it was built of rammed earth where earth was all there was, and of stone and kiln-fired brick set in lime-and-rice mortar in the Ming, by soldiers, peasants and convicts. The whole system measures 21,196 km (13,171 miles) in the 2012 survey, of which the Ming wall is 8,850 km, and it is not visible from space with the naked eye. Below: who built what, why, how it was built, the numbers, whether it worked, and the legends, with the temples of the same dynasties in the Ancient temples of the world collection.

Who built it: the dynasties

• Warring States, 7th–3rd centuries BC. The kingdoms of Qi, Wei, Zhao, Yan and Qin built earth walls against one another and against the nomads; parts of Qi's wall in Shandong still stand.
• Qin, 221–206 BC. After uniting China, Qin Shi Huang sent General Meng Tian with 300,000 men to destroy the walls between the old states and link the northern ones into a single line from Gansu to the sea, about 5,000 km, in ten years; almost nothing of it survives, and its course lay well north of the Ming wall. The historian Sima Qian records it as the "Long Wall of Ten Thousand Li", the name still used in Chinese.
• Han, 206 BC–AD 220. Emperor Wu extended the wall west along the Hexi corridor to Dunhuang and the Jade Gate to protect the Silk Road, with beacon towers every few kilometres; stretches of Han rammed earth and reed still stand in the Gobi.
• Northern Wei, Northern Qi, Sui, 5th–7th centuries. Short-lived northern dynasties built thousands of kilometres of earth wall, the Northern Qi alone 3,000 km.
• Jin, 12th century. The Jurchen Jin built ditches and earth ramparts far north in Mongolia against the rising Mongols.
• Ming, 1368–1644. After expelling the Mongols, and above all after the emperor was captured by them at Tumu in 1449, the Ming built the wall everyone knows: 8,850 km of stone and brick with watchtowers, garrison forts and the passes of Shanhaiguan at the sea, Juyongguan and Badaling near Beijing, and Jiayuguan at the western end, on a line closer to the capital than any earlier wall. It was still being built when the dynasty fell.

The Qing who followed, being Manchus from beyond the wall, had no use for it and let it decay. History of the Great Wall.

Why: the steppe and the border

North of the Chinese farmland is grassland where crops fail and horses thrive, and for two thousand years its peoples, the Xiongnu, the Xianbei, the Turks, the Khitan, the Jurchen, the Mongols and the Manchus, raided the settled south for grain, silk and captives and, twice, conquered it outright. The wall was the settled state's answer: a barrier that horsemen could not ride over, with towers to signal a raid by smoke and fire down the line to the garrisons, and gates where trade could be taxed and controlled. It also marked the frontier of the empire and, for the Qin and Ming, of what they considered civilisation. Whether it was worth the cost was argued in every dynasty: the Han often preferred to pay the nomads off or marry princesses to their khans, and the Tang, whose emperors were half-steppe themselves, built almost no wall and held the north with cavalry instead. The Ming, having tried to fight the Mongols in the field and lost an emperor, chose the wall, and spent a large part of the state's revenue on it for two centuries. Great Wall of China.

How it was built

• Rammed earth. The Qin, Han and most later walls were built by pounding layers of moist earth a few inches at a time inside wooden shuttering, layer on layer, into a solid wall 4–5 m high; in the desert, layers of earth alternated with reeds, tamarisk branches and gravel. Fast, cheap, and durable in a dry climate, which is why Han walls survive in Gansu and Qin walls have melted in the wetter east.
• Stone. In the mountains the Ming used local granite and limestone, quarried and dressed by hand, for foundations and for whole stretches of the wall.
• Brick. The Ming innovation: kilns built along the line fired bricks of about 10 kg each, laid in a mortar of slaked lime mixed with sticky rice soup, whose amylopectin makes the mortar so strong and water-resistant that weeds cannot root in it; a brick facing over a core of earth and rubble, with a paved walkway 4–5 m wide on top, crenellated parapets, drains and steps.
• Towers and forts. Watchtowers every 200–500 m, beacon towers on high ground, and garrison towns behind the wall; the Ming wall had some 25,000 towers.
• Route. Along ridgelines, using the mountain as part of the defence, which is why the wall climbs slopes at 70 degrees and crosses peaks that no army could cross anyway; the builders followed the principle that the wall should command the ground.
• Labour. Soldiers, conscripted peasants and convicts sentenced to wall-building; Qin sources speak of hundreds of thousands, and the Ming used its frontier army. Materials were carried by men, donkeys and goats up the mountains; wheelbarrows and hoists were used where they could be.

The construction methods of the ancient world are compared in Roman roads and concrete and the walls' Chinese contemporaries stand in the Mogao Caves at the Han wall's western end and the Ming Temple of Heaven in Beijing.

How long, how high, and the numbers

The 2012 survey by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage measured every wall of every dynasty at 21,196.18 km, including branches and parallel lines; the Ming wall proper is 8,851.8 km, of which 6,259 km is built wall, 359 km trenches and 2,232 km natural barriers such as rivers and cliffs. It runs from Hushan on the North Korean border to Jiayuguan in Gansu across fifteen provinces. The Ming wall near Beijing is 6–8 m high and 4–5 m wide at the top; the highest point is at Huanghuacheng, and the steepest steps at Simatai and Jiankou. About 30 per cent of the Ming wall has vanished and much of the rest is ruin; the restored tourist sections at Badaling, Mutianyu, Juyongguan and Jinshanling amount to a few dozen kilometres, and Badaling alone takes around ten million visitors a year. UNESCO listed the wall in 1987.

Did it work?

Against small raids, yes: the towers gave warning and the wall stopped horses, so raiders had to break through at a point where the garrison could concentrate. Against a determined army, less so. The Mongols under Genghis Khan went around and through the Jin walls in 1211 and took Beijing; the Manchus entered China in 1644 not by storming the wall but because the commander of Shanhaiguan, Wu Sangui, opened the gate to them to fight a rebel who had taken the capital. Altan Khan's Mongols reached the walls of Beijing in 1550 after breaking through a weak section. The wall's real value was as a frontier system: it made raiding expensive, channelled trade through the gates, and let the Ming keep an army on the border for two centuries in fixed positions. Economic historians point out that what the wall cost the Ming might have bought peace several times over, which is what the Han had done. Its Roman counterpart, Hadrian's Wall, worked the same way at one-hundredth the length.

Versions and theories

• Visible from space. No. The claim was made in 1754, before anyone had been there, and repeated in Ripley's and school textbooks; astronauts including China's first, Yang Liwei in 2003, report they could not see it, since it is a few metres wide and the colour of the ground. It shows in photographs from low orbit with a telephoto lens, like a road.
• The longest cemetery on earth. Chinese folklore says a million workers died building the Qin wall and were buried in it; the legend of Meng Jiangnü, whose tears brought down a section to reveal her husband's bones, is two thousand years old. Deaths were certainly enormous, but no bodies have been found inside the wall itself; rotting corpses would have weakened it, and the dead were buried nearby.
• One continuous wall. It is a network of walls, ditches and forts of different dates, with gaps and parallel lines; the idea of a single unbroken "Great Wall" was largely created by European writers from the 17th century and adopted in China in the 20th.
• Sticky-rice mortar. Confirmed by chemical analysis in 2010: Ming mortar contains amylopectin from rice, which is why 500-year-old brickwork is still tight.
• The Great Wall of the Han was the Silk Road's border post. True: the Jade Gate and Yang Pass in Gansu were customs stations where caravans were checked, and wooden documents from their garrisons survive.
• Nixon and Mao's wall. Mao wrote in a 1935 poem that "he who has not reached the Great Wall is not a true man", which turned a ruin into a national symbol; Nixon at Badaling in 1972 said "this is a great wall" and the tourist age began.

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