History: The Great Wall of China

The Great Chinese Wall is one of the wonders of the world so that UNESCO has included it in the World Heritage to better protect it for the future generations. It's a series of defensive walls built in all the Northern part of China from the Yalu River, on the border with North Korea, to Kansu, in the Western part of the Gobi Desert, for a lenght of more than 6000 Km and a thickness of less than 10 metres, to protect the Chinese Empire from the Mongolian nomadic populations coming from the North. Its systematic building started about 230 B.C. (although there're traces of walls built even some centuries before in China), under the great and very cruel Emperor QIN SHI HUANG, the same who reunified the whole China for the first time and made build the famous terracotta army for his immense grave.

Its building was slow, with several partial destructions and rebuildings, a faithful witness of the various periods of prosperity and weakness of the Chinese Empire during its long history. It has been considered complete only in the XVI century. It runs today along hills and mountains crests, gorges and rivers and it's made of local materials, like cooked earth and stones, but not only; infact, ancient records report that at least 1 million of slaves and prisoners had worked hard and often died from starvation or exaustion and their bones were added to the materials used for the building.

Then, for centuries, this wall was known as "the longest cemetery of the world". It's protection and maintenance is not easy today and it has recently denounced that, in many points, far from Beijing, the wall is in bad conditions, even tearing down, also because many "barbaric" tourists try to take away with them a piece or brick of it as a souvenir. I hope that the Chinese government will make more to protect this unmatched symbol of China, despite the today advanced destruction of many historic centres of Chinese towns, like Shangai, Canton, Beijin and others to build infinite series of skyscrapers, without any bit of soul and identity anymore.
Surely, nobody will come in China to visit its skyscrapers, but millions of tourists come and WILL come to see the Chinese Wall, paying for this all the services available.