George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, 1797.

Up the sides of distant mountains was descried, in the morning of the fourth day’s journey, a prominent line, or narrow and unequal mark, such as appear to be formed sometimes, but more irregularly, by the veins of quartz when viewed from afar in the sides of the mountains of Gneiss, in Scotland. the continuance of this line to the Tartarian mountains’ tops, was sufficient to arrest the attention of the beholder; and the form of a wall with battlements was, in a little time, distinctly discerned, where such buildings were not expected to be found, nor thought practicable to be erected. What they eye could, from a single spot, embrace of those fortified walls, carried along the ridges of hills, over the tops of the highest [359] mountains, descending into the deepest valleys, crossing upon arches over rivers, and doubled and trebled in many parts to take in important passes, and interspersed with towers or massy bastions at almost every hundred yards, as far as the sight could reach, presented to the mind an undertaking of stupendous magnitude. The travelers were not able to determine, from their own feelings, that it was not alone the dimensions of those walls, however considerable, that made the impression of wonder upon the persons who had hitherto seen these intended barriers against the Tartars. Astonishment seldom is excited by the mere effects of the continuance or multiplication of labor, that may be performed by common means. It was the extreme difficulty of conceiving how the materials could be conveyed, and such structures raised, in situations apparently inaccessible, which principally occasioned surprise and admiration. One of the most elevated ridges over which the great wall is carried has been ascertained to measure five thousand two hundred and twenty-five feet.

This species of fortification, for to call it simply by the name of wall does not convey an adequate idea of such a fabric, is described to extend, tho not equally perfected throughout, in a [360] course of fifteenth hundred miles; for of what length was the boundary line between the civilized Chinese, and several restless Tartar tribes. Upon such barriers, indeed, was not supposed to depend the fate of nations in actual war. A superior army is always found to overcome every species of defense; no fortification is impregnable; but fortresses delay the progress of an enemy. They preserve a country from being surprised by a sudden invasion; and fortified walls protracted along a boundary line, serve as a protection against sudden an unexpected inroads, or the partial attacks of individual plunderers in the midst of peace. Thus the Romans, however brave and warlike, erected several such barriers in Britain, against the uncivilized Picts. Whenever a nation, in such an advanced state of society as to be engaged in the cultivation of the soil, has happened to be in the neighborhood of a people of mere hunters, who may be considered as partaking, themselves, of the nature of beasts of prey, the former has frequently had recourse to the erection of strong ramparts against the perpetual devastations of the latter. Several were raised for this purpose in Egypt, in Syria, in Media; one to the eastward of the Caspian sea, by a successor of Alexander, and another in [361] the country of Tamerlane; the two last intended, like the Chinese wall, against hordes of roving Tartars. It is probably that most of these answered for a time the end for which they were erected; and perhaps until the circumstances which called for such a separation between neighboring states had themselves ceased to exist. The memory of them is preserved among the greatest monuments of human enterprise; yet all of them united, whether they be considered as to the extent of the country over which they were carried, and which they were meant to protect, or as to the quantity of materials employed in their construction, or the labor requisite to overcome the difficulties of situation, were not equal to the Chinese wall alone. It has likewise far exceeded them in duration, as well as in solidity. Many of the inner and weaker appendages to this great rampart have indeed yielded to the effects of time, and are moldering to decay; and others have undergone repair; but the main work seems in most places to have been built with a degree of care and architectural skill, which, without any subsequent attention or addition, have preserved it entire for about two thousand years; and it appears almost as little liable to injury as the rocky and mountainous bulwarks [362] which nature itself had raised between Tartary and China.

The period of the first erection of any artificial barrier between those two countries is not particularly ascertained; but that of its completion is an historical fact as authentic as any of those which the annals of ancient kingdoms have transmitted to posterity. From that period, about three centuries before the Christian era, the transactions of the Chinese empire have been regularly, and without any intervening chasm, recorded, both in official documents, and by private contemporary writers. Nowhere had history become so much an object of public attention, and nowhere more the occupation of learned individuals. Every considerable town throughout the empire was a kind of university, in which degrees were conferred on the proficient in the history and government of the state. Historical works were multiplied throughout. The accounts of recent events were exposed oto the correction of the witnesses of the facts; and compilations of former transactions to the criticisms of rival writers. Under all these circumstances little doubt can be entertained concerning the epoch of an undertaking to which hundreds of thousands must have concurred; which is mentioned in [363] the histories of time, and repeated, or alluded to, in those of every subsequent period. Historical evidence depends, in the first instance, upon the personal credit given to the assertions of contemporary writers; and upon their consistency with public records, monuments, and other facts and circumstances within the knowledge or observation of the reader. Such creditable writers vouches, upon the same grounds, for the truth of those who immediately preceded him; and thus facts are traced by induction, strictly and critically pursued, in a retrograde scale, as far as it can be carried by regular links, to the most remote transactions in the truth of which any coincidence is to be placed. it is upon such induction that is founded the belief of events removed from the immediate cognizance of the senses. There seem to be no other grounds for the certainty of the existence, for example, of the Roman commonwealth, or fo the battle of Actium, or of the invasion of England by the Norman Conqueror.

Of the twenty centuries which the Chinese wall appears with equal certainty to have subsisted, it was, during sixteen of them, found effectual in excluding the Tartar hordes, until the mighty torrent of Genghis-Khan’s power ren- [364] dered every resistance vain; a power, however, which falling from the hands of his descendants in less than a single century, the Tartars were expelled and kept out of China near three hundred years, till in the last age, in the violence of internal rebellion, they were invited back to that country, where they have ever since maintained the empire in a tranquil and flourishing state.

Besides the means of defense which the great wall furnished in time of war, it was considered as an advantage by the Chinese, whose regulated manner and settled mode of life little accorded with the roving and restless disposition of their northern neighbors, that even in times of peace it impeded the communication between them; nor was it without its use in keeping out from the fertile provinces of China the numerous and ferocious beasts that haunt the wilds of Tartary, as well as to fix the boundary between the two counties, and to prevent the escape of malefactors out of China, or the emigration of malcontents.

Till the establishment of the present dynasty, few projects of foreign conquest appear to have been entertained in China; and it is still there a favorite point of policy to confine its subjects within the limits of the empire. They who [365] depart from it without licence are liable to severe punishment on their return.

The importance, however, of the great wall of China has in great measure ceased, since the territories on each side of it have been subjected to the same monarch. The Chinese, with whom curiosity vanishes with the novelty of the object, look upon it now with perfect indifference; and few of the mandarins who accompanied the Embassy, seemed to pay the least attention to it. Yet the appearance of so vast a monument of human industry has not failed to attract the notice of those foreigners who have crossed in on their entrance into China. The first European who published any account of that empire, Marco Polo, has made, however, no mention of the wall; who, as he traveled over land to the capital of China, it was presumed that he must have passed to it though Tartary in some spot where the wall now stands. From such silence some doubts have arisen in the mind of a learned Italian, who has in contemplation to publish a new edition of Marco Polo’s Travels, whether the wall was really in existence in te thirteenth century, when that celebrated Venetian went to the court of the Tartar sovereign of China. But the mere omission of that fact by him, could not [366] be made to weigh against the existence of it, when supported by the same species of positive testimony, which is thought decisive in all other instances, were it even to be supposed that Marco Polo had actually passed over th ground where the wall subsists at present; and had given to the world a regular account of his travels immediately on his return, instead of the unconnected fragments which he dictated long afterwards, at a distance from his own home, and separated, as he was probably, from the notes taken on the spot, and other his original papers. A copy, however, of Marco Polo’s route to China, taken from the Doge’s library at Venice, is sufficient to decide this question. By this route it appears that, in fact, that traveler did no pass through Tartary to Pekin; but that after having followed the usual track of the caravans, as far to the eastward from Europe as Samarkand and Kashgar, he bent his course to the south-east across the river Ganges to Bengal; and, keeping to the southward of the Tibet mountains, reached the Chinese Province of Shensee, and through the adjoining province of Shansee to the capital, without interfering with the line of the great wall.

The present travelers approached the wall by [367] a steep ascent, until they came to what was called the southern gate, in reference to an outer one more northerly, on the side of Tartary. This southern gate was thrown across the road, where it passed over the summit of a rnage of hills, in most parts inaccessible. It was built for the defense of the pass in a very strong situation, the ridge of the hills was narrow, and its descent steep. The rad ran along it through a defile, at the extremity of which was a military post.

Captain Parish observes, “that military posts are usually square of various dimensions, at which a few men are constantly quartered. It is probably, that in the even of war, they would become the rendezvous of the troops in the neighborhood. They are situated at the entrance of passes, or on eminence difficult to access; or on the narrow passages of rivers. They vary from about forty feet square and as many in height, to so low as four feet square and six feet high. There are few indeed so very small as the last dimensions. One, however, of this description, was met on the road from Peking to this place: The larger towers are entered by a flight of steps, usually completed by loose stones, which lead to a small arch at about half the height of the [368]  tower from the base.