Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: When did construction on the Great Wall of China begin?
The history of the Great Wall of China began when fortifications built by various states during the Spring and Autumn (771–476BC)[1] and Warring States periods (475–221BC) were connected by the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, to protect his newly founded Qin dynasty (221–206BC) against incursions by nomads from Inner Asia. The walls were built of rammed earth, constructed using forced labour, and by 212 BC ran from Gansu to the coast of southern Manchuria.
Defense of the Great Wall Gates of Alexander Great Wall of China hoax Great Wall Marathon Great Wall of Qi Huangya Pass Jiankou List of World Heritage Sites in China Miaojiang Great Wall Roman military frontiers and fortifications
Large tempered earth (i.e. rammed earth) walls were built in ancient China since the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1050 BC); the capital at ancient Ao had enormous walls built in this fashion (see siege for more info). Although stone walls were built in China during the Warring States (481–221 BC), mass conversion to stone architecture did not begin in earnest until the Tang dynasty (618–907 AD). The Great Wall of China had been built since the Qin dynasty (221–207 BC), although its present form was mostly an engineering feat and remodelling of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 AD).
Since then, many scholars have operated under the belief that the Great Wall continually defended China's border against the steppe nomads for two thousand years.[186] For example, the 18th-century sinologist Joseph de Guignes assigned macrohistorical importance to such walls when he advanced the theory that the Qin construction forced the Xiongnu to migrate west to Europe and, becoming known as the Huns, ultimately contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.[187] Some have attempted to make general statements regarding Chinese society and foreign policy based on the conception of a perennial Great Wall: Karl Marx took the Wall to represent the stagnation of the Chinese society and economy,[188] Owen Lattimore supposed that the Great Wall demonstrated a need to divide the nomadic way of life from the agricultural communities of China,[189] and John K. Fairbank posited that the Wall played a part in upholding the Sinocentric world order.[190]
The Trump wall, or simply the Wall, is a colloquial name for a proposed expansion of the Mexico–United States barrier during the presidency of Donald Trump. Throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump called for the construction of a much larger and fortified border wall, claiming that if elected, he would "build the wall and make Mexico pay for it." Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has said his country would not pay for the wall. On January 25, 2017, the Trump administration signed Executive Order 13767, which formally directed the US government to begin attempting to construct a border wall using existing federal funding, although actual construction of a wall did not begin at this time due to the large expense and lack of clarity on how it would be paid for. From December 22, 2018 to January 25, 2019, the federal government was partly shut down due to Trump's declared intention to veto any spending bill that did not include $5 billion in funding for a border wall.
The film begins with a soldier walking through the Great Wall, when a falcon named Hayabusa knocks off his helmet. Then, the Huns, who are led by the ruthless Shan Yu, invade Han China by breaching the Great Wall, while the Chinese emperor orders a general mobilization. Conscription notices require one man from each family to join the Chinese army. 
As China opened up in the 1980s, reformist leader Deng Xiaoping initiated the "Love our China and restore our Great Wall" campaign (爱我中华，修我长城) to repair and preserve the Great Wall.[181] The Great Wall was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.[5] However, while tourism boomed over the years, slipshod restoration methods have left sections of the Great Wall near Beijing "looking like a Hollywood set" in the words of the National Geographic News.[182] The less prominent stretches of the Great Wall did not get as much attention. In 2002 the New York-based World Monuments Fund put the Great Wall on its list of the World's 100 Most Endangered Sites. In 2003 the Chinese government began to enact laws to protect the Great Wall.[182]
The earliest walls and platforms in China were of rammed earth construction, and over time brick and stone became more frequently used. This can be seen in ancient sections of the Great Wall of China, while the brick and stone Great Wall seen today is a renovation of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644).Chinese classifications for architecture include:
Although a formal definition of what constitutes a "Great Wall" has not been agreed upon, making the full course of the Great Wall difficult to describe in its entirety,[51] the course of the main Great Wall line following Ming constructions can be charted.
The Great Wall of China hoax was a faked newspaper story concocted on June 25, 1899 by four reporters in Denver, Colorado about bids by American businesses on a contract to demolish the Great Wall of China and construct a road in its place. The story was reprinted by a number of newspapers.
"The Great Wall of China" (original title "Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer", literally "During the construction of the Great Wall of China") is a short story by Franz Kafka. While written in 1917, it was not published until 1930, seven years after his death. Its first publication occurred in "Der Morgen", a German literary magazine. A year later, Max Brod included it in "Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer", the first posthumous collection of short stories by Franz Kafka.
Europeans first witnessed the Great Wall in the early 1600s. Perhaps the first recorded instance of a European actually entering China via the Great Wall came in 1605, when the Portuguese Jesuit brother Bento de Góis reached the northwestern Jiayu Pass from India.[159] Ivan Petlin's 1619 deposition for his Russian embassy mission offers an early account based on a first-hand encounter with the Great Wall, and mentions that in the course of the journey his embassy travelled alongside the Great Wall for ten days.[160]
Large rammed earth walls were built in ancient China since the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600–1050BC), as the capital at ancient Ao had enormous walls built in this fashion (see siege for more info). Although stone walls were built in China during the Warring States (481–221BC), mass conversion to stone architecture did not begin in earnest until the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD). Sections of the Great Wall had been built prior to the Qin Dynasty (221–207BC) and subsequently connected and fortified during the Qin dynasty, although its present form was mostly an engineering feat and remodeling of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644AD). The large walls of Pingyao serve as one example. Likewise, the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing were established in the early 15th century by the Yongle Emperor.
Western scholarship of the Great Wall was, until recently, affected by misconceptions derived from traditional accounts of the Wall. When the Jesuits brought back the first reports of the Wall to the West, European scholars were puzzled that Marco Polo had not mentioned the presumably perennial "Great Wall" in his Travels. Some 17th-century scholars reasoned that the Wall must have been built in the Ming dynasty, after Marco Polo's departure. This view was soon replaced by another that argued, against Polo's own account, that the Venetian merchant had come to China from the south and so did not come into contact with the Wall.[115] Thus, Father Martino Martini's mistaken claim that the Wall had "lasted right up to the present time without injury or destruction"[184] since the time of Qin was accepted as fact by the 18th-century philosophes.[185]
"The First Mound" – at Jiayuguan, the western terminus of the Ming wall The Great Wall of China at Badaling The Juyongguan area of the Great Wall accepts numerous tourists each day A portion of the Great Wall of China at Simatai, overlooking the gorge Mutianyu Great Wall, China. This is atop the wall on a section that has not been restored The Old Dragon Head, the Great Wall where it meets the sea in the vicinity of Shanhaiguan Gateway of Gubeikou Fortress at Gubeikou
Under Qing rule, China's borders extended beyond the walls and Mongolia was annexed into the empire, so constructions on the Great Wall were discontinued. On the other hand, the so-called Willow Palisade, following a line similar to that of the Ming Liaodong Wall, was constructed by the Qing rulers in Manchuria. Its purpose, however, was not defense but rather to prevent Han Chinese migration into Manchuria.[37]
China is a cultural hearth area of eastern Asia, many Far East building methods and styles evolved from China. A famous example of Chinese construction is the Great Wall of China built between the 7th and 2nd centuries BC. The Great Wall was built with rammed earth, stones, and wood and later bricks and tiles with lime mortar. Wooden gates blocked passageways. The oldest archaeological examples of mortise and tenon type woodworking joints were found in China dating to about 5000 BC.
The sections of the Great Wall around Beijing municipality are especially famous: they were frequently renovated and are regularly visited by tourists today. The Badaling Great Wall near Zhangjiakou is the most famous stretch of the Wall, for this is the first section to be opened to the public in the People's Republic of China, as well as the showpiece stretch for foreign dignitaries.[52] South of Badaling is the Juyong Pass; when used by the Chinese to protect their land, this section of the wall had many guards to defend China's capital Beijing. Made of stone and bricks from the hills, this portion of the Great Wall is 7.8m (25ft 7in) high and 5m (16ft 5in) wide.
Early European accounts were mostly modest and empirical, closely mirroring contemporary Chinese understanding of the Wall.[161] However, when the Ming Great Wall began to take on a shape recognizable today, foreign accounts of the Wall slid into hyperbole.[162] In the Atlas Sinensis published in 1665, the Jesuit Martino Martini described elaborate but atypical stretches of the Great Wall and generalized such fortifications across the whole northern frontier. Furthermore, Martini erroneously identified the Ming Wall as the same wall built by Qin Shi Huang in the 3rd century BC, thereby exaggerating both the Wall's antiquity and its size. This misconception was compounded by the China Illustrata of Father Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), which provided pictures of the Great Wall as imagined by a European illustrator.[162] All these and other accounts from missionaries in China contributed to the Orientalism of the eighteenth century, in which a mythical China and its exaggerated Great Wall feature prominently. The French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1774), for example, frequently wrote about the Great Wall, although his feelings towards it oscillate between unreserved admiration and condemnation of it as a "monument to fear".[163] The Macartney Embassy of 1793 passed through the Great Wall at Gubeikou on the way to see the Qianlong Emperor in Chengde, who was there for the annual imperial hunt. One of the embassy's members, John Barrow, later founder of the Royal Geographical Society, spuriously calculated that the amount of stone in the Wall was equivalent to "all the dwelling houses of England and Scotland" and would suffice to encircle the Earth at the equator twice.[164] The illustrations of the Great Wall by Lieutenant Henry William Parish during this mission would be reproduced in influential works such as Thomas Allom's 1845 China, in a series of views.[165]
When Great Meadow first opened it was home to mostly first time offenders, and therefore it did not need a wall for many years. But as inmate population grew Great Meadows Correctional Facility started receiving second- and third-time offenders from other New York prisons such as Sing Sing and Clinton. Still, without a good wall, many inmates could not be sent to Great Meadow Correctional Facility. In 1924 construction of a wall began. Four years later, the inmates had successfully finished walling themselves in. The wall encloses just over twenty-one acres. With the completion of building this wall Great Meadow became a maximum-security facility.
The four reporters concocted a story in which the Chinese planned to demolish the Great Wall, constructing a road in its place, and were taking bids from American companies for the project. Chicago engineer Frank C. Lewis was bidding for the job. The story described a group of engineers in a Denver stopover on their way to China.
When China opened its borders to foreign merchants and visitors after its defeat in the First and Second Opium Wars, the Great Wall became a main attraction for tourists. The travelogues of the later 19th century further enhanced the reputation and the mythology of the Great Wall,[49] such that in the 20th century, a persistent misconception exists about the Great Wall of China being visible from the Moon or even Mars.[50]
With that, the Yuan dynasty, established by Genghis Khan's grandson Khublai Khan, became the first foreign dynasty to rule all of China.[112] Despite being the head of the Mongol Empire, Khublai Khan's rule over China was not free from the threat of the steppe nomads.[113] The Yuan dynasty faced challenges from rival claimants to the title of Great Khan and from rebellious Mongols in the north. Khublai Khan dealt with such threats by using both military blockades and economic sanctions. Although he established garrisons along the steppe frontier from the Juyan Lake Basin in the far west to Yingchang in the east,[114] Khublai Khan and the Yuan emperors after him did not add to the Great Wall (except for the ornate Cloud Platform at Juyong Pass). When the Venetian traveller Marco Polo wrote of his experiences in China during the reign of Khublai Khan, he did not mention a Great Wall.[115]
King Zheng of Qin conquered the last of his opponents and unified China as the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty ("Qin Shi Huang") in 221BC. Intending to impose centralized rule and prevent the resurgence of feudal lords, he ordered the destruction of the sections of the walls that divided his empire among the former states. To position the empire against the Xiongnu people from the north, however, he ordered the building of new walls to connect the remaining fortifications along the empire's northern frontier. "Build and move on" was a central guiding principle in constructing the wall, implying that the Chinese were not erecting a permanently fixed border.[23] Transporting the large quantity of materials required for construction was difficult, so builders always tried to use local resources. Stones from the mountains were used over mountain ranges, while rammed earth was used for construction in the plains. There are no surviving historical records indicating the exact length and course of the Qin walls. Most of the ancient walls have eroded away over the centuries, and very few sections remain today. The human cost of the construction is unknown, but it has been estimated by some authors that hundreds of thousands,[24] if not up to a million, workers died building the Qin wall.[25][26] Later, the Han,[27] the Sui, and the Northern dynasties all repaired, rebuilt, or expanded sections of the Great Wall at great cost to defend themselves against northern invaders.[28] The Tang and Song dynasties did not undertake any significant effort in the region.[28] The Liao, Jin, and Yuan dynasties, who ruled Northern China throughout most of the 10th–13th centuries, constructed defensive walls in the 12th century but those were located much to the north of the Great Wall as we know it, within China's province of Inner Mongolia and in Mongolia itself.[29]
The Jiankou section of the Great Wall of China is located in the Huairou District within the city limits of Beijing, north of Beijing city center. The Jiankou section of the Great Wall of China is located between the Mutianyu - ten kilometers to the east - and the Moshikou sections of the Great Wall of China. The Jiankou section of the wall was constructed in 1368 during the period of the Ming Dynasty. It is made of large light colored rocks which can be seen from a great distance. 