The Great Wall - China Against the World 1000 BC - 2000 AD

This book looks behind the modern mythology of the Great Wall to uncover a 3000-year history far more fragmented and far less straightforwardly illustrious than its crowds of visitors imagine. The story of the Wall winds through that of the Chinese state and of the frontier policy that defined it, through the lives of the millions of individuals who supported, criticised, built and attacked it. It is time to see the Wall less as it is now - a great tourist attraction, an impressive piece of engineering - and more as it has been throughout its monumental history: a symbol that reveals China's sense of itself, and of the outside world.