You've Been Lied to About The Great Wall of China

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:01]There's a simple question I got completely wrong. How old is the Great Wall of China?

[00:00:07]>> Um uh uh >> I have no idea. I think it's very old.

[00:00:12]>> Maybe 2,000 years.

[00:00:14]>> Over 2,000 years old.

[00:00:16]>> Maybe before Christ. Maybe 5,000 years old.

[00:00:20]>> So, I thought it was about 2,000 years old. A structure built around the same time as the Colosseum. online. People ask if it's before Jesus. Documentaries will say it's even older.

[00:00:32]>> Construction began over 500 years before Christ.

[00:00:36]>> And tour guides in Beijing promise a visit to an ancient place. But 2 years ago, I was making a video on modern walls. And in my research, I came across one sentence about the Great Wall of China that showed me this wasn't true. I found out we've been lied to about the Great Wall of China.

[00:00:59]So, before I started making this video, I thought I knew four things about the Great Wall of China. The first, its age.

[00:01:07]I thought it was about 2,000 years old.

[00:01:12]The second, one continuous line line uh from um the sea to the Gobi Desert.

[00:01:21]The third it was to stop Mongol invasions.

[00:01:24]So stop invasions. And then the fourth, there was a thing when I was in elementary school that people were saying it's the only man-made object that you can see from space.

[00:01:37]I wanted to find out if these things were true. So let's start with the shape.

[00:01:43]>> Oh boy. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. What's the comments? Um >> I really don't know.

[00:01:50]I've been there, so I should know where it is.

[00:01:54]>> Somewhere here.

[00:01:55]>> Goes like this, like this, like this, like this, like this.

[00:02:02]>> I don't know if this is correct, but >> So, this is how people in my office drew the wall. One long line in different parts of China. This long line is also what documentaries will tell you. It extends across China on a zigzag course for over 1,500 miles. Now documentaries from the '90s are not the best source.

[00:02:24]So how does it actually look?

[00:02:30]And I found this map.

[00:02:34]This already rocked my world. It shows not one single wall, but so many different walls all over China, even going into North Korea and Mongolia.

[00:02:44]Now, Wikipedia has been wrong in the past, but even if we dig deeper in history books, we find that there are actually many different Chinese walls built in different times.

[00:02:55]This video of the American Smithsonian Museum shows it, too. A lot of different walls all over the place.

[00:03:03]I've combined different sources to make this map with walls built in different eras. What this shows is that the Great Wall of China that you're always sold, the one with the bricks, is just the latest version of a project that has been going on for a long time. So, if it's not a single line, was I right about why it is built against invasions?

[00:03:24]Chinese history goes back a long way.

[00:03:27]It's one of the oldest civilizations that is still around. For most of recorded time, it has been the richest place on earth. And because of this, the history of China is dominated by two constant battles. The first battle is between different dynasties trying to gain control over this huge and wealthy civilization. This means depending on the time, China can mean this or it can mean this.

[00:03:53]The first Chinese walls were up when the country was split up between different waring states in the waring states era.

[00:04:00]A good name, I guess. Recent research has shown foundations that go back to the seventh century before Christ. They wanted to protect themselves from each other, but they also built walls to defend themselves from the dangers to the north, the second battle in Chinese history. As China is this rich civilization, it has always been attractive to their neighbors. North of China, you have the eastern edge of the big Eurasian step. This huge swath of plains with little elevation and plenty of grass. It's not really great for farming, but it's perfect to keep horses.

[00:04:36]So, you have these step nomads that basically live on horseback. They are really skilled with bow and arrow, and they would often raid their southern neighbors for supplies. For the Chinese, this was a constant danger. So, a wall built to defend against invaders. I got that right, at least. Now, let's see how old this wall is. There are three main dynasties that built the most walls.

[00:04:58]Emperor Shin Shuang unified China. Many of the internal walls in his new empire didn't really make sense, so he ordered them to be destroyed and he then linked existing walls to the north. This wall was both meant to mark the edge of the empire, but it was also a barrier to protect against raiders. The wall was around 2400 km from Leadong Province to Lintauo. Now, this first construction is something we could call a great wall, but that's not the name the Chinese choose. So, the first name that comes up for these walls is um >> Chong Chun.

[00:05:35]>> Chong Chung, sorry.

[00:05:40]This is really bad.

[00:05:45]So, Chun, I guess. And this could mean long wall or long walls. After the Chin unification, there's a historian that comes up with a different term. He calls it the one le Chong Chang.

[00:06:03]Oh god.

[00:06:05]So Lee is a unit of measurement. It means about.5 km or.3 miles. And then one means 10,000. So one lee means 10,000 lee or about 5,000 km or 3,000 m.

[00:06:23]Now we shouldn't take this historian literally. Uh we shouldn't think, oh, there were exactly 5,000 km of wall around. It just basically means a lot, but the wall would get a lot longer. The Han dynasty came around and they wanted to protect the silk road, especially the Heshi corridor, a path between the Tabitan and Mongolian plateaus.

[00:06:46]But the Han wall, it looks completely different from what I'm used to seeing when I look for images of the wall.

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[00:08:21]This is Jayu Pass on the western border.

[00:08:23]It has a really cool fortification, but that was built much later. The walls here are actually made of rammed earth.

[00:08:31]What you do is you take a layer of wet earth in a wooded mold. Then you ram this until it's compact and you just repeat the process. The Han would then add layers of reed that would stiffen the structure and serve as an extra layer of defense. After the Han, some dynasties built walls, others did not.

[00:08:50]At times, the Chinese Empire was either too big or too small for the walls to make a difference. In the 1200s, China was part of the Mongol Empire, the biggest connected empire to have existed on the globe. Most walls were now situated in the middle of their territory.

[00:09:06]But we're now in the 1200s, and the wall that is presented as the Great Wall of China still hasn't been built.

[00:09:18]And then finally, the Bing come around.

[00:09:21]First, they think they can take on the Mongols, but that doesn't really go to plan. It's only after a Mongol invasion in 50/50 that they finally start building a brick wall.

[00:09:34]And this changed everything for them.

[00:09:36]Now they started a 100red-year project to build with brick through gorgees over steep mountain passes built with hundreds and thousands of workers. A project that cost so many lives, people said the mortar holding the stones together was white because of the crushed bones of the fallen workers that was mixed in. This is the wall that you know and love and it's the one visited by millions of tourists each year.

[00:10:06]So this part of the Ming Dynasty wall is not 2,000 years old.

[00:10:12]It's it's not even a thousand.

[00:10:16]It's just over 400 years old.

[00:10:20]There's about 1500 years between the building of the coliseum in Rome and the Ming Wall, but there are only about 300 years between the Ming Wall and the Eiffel Tower.

[00:10:31]There are many buildings in my town that are older. I mean, all the people that go to Beijing and go on a tour and and they're told that they're about to see an ancient wall, they kind of get played. I read this writer who said that this claim of the tour guides lists between polite fiction and outright fraud. So where do these myths come from? Why did I think it was one ancient continuous structure called the Great Wall of China that you could see from the moon? As so often in modern history, it's the fall of the British. Europeans had been going to China and talking about the wall they saw for a few centuries when in 1793 the British diplomat Lord George McCartney goes there. He is inspired by the accounts he read and he makes a point of traveling to the wall to see it for himself. The British make all these sketches of the Ming wall and McCartney has no idea that this Ming wall is just the latest form of something that has been going on for a very long time. the remote period of its building. China must not only have been a very powerful empire but a very wise and virtuous nation to build such a wall.

[00:11:38]>> A remote period of its building.

[00:11:40]>> All the writings agree this wall was built about 200 years before the Christian era.

[00:11:45]>> And here we have it. Here he situates the walls that he sees to 200 before Christ. That would make them 2,000 years old. But in reality they're not even 200 years old. The writings of him and a lot of people in his party are published and are really influential. And following writers just take these vibes as facts, cementing the fact that the wall you see north of Beijing is 2,000 years old. But they don't explain why I thought the wall was visible from space as a kid.

[00:12:24]October 2003 was an important day for the Chinese space program. Young Li would become the first Chinese man to make it to space.

[00:12:36]>> But this day was special for another reason. For decades, Chinese school textbooks have made the claim that you could see the Chinese wall from space.

[00:12:44]The fact that Western astronauts had already debunked this claim was not seen as sufficient reason to change the text.

[00:12:52]So when he came down, there was one important question that reporters asked of Young. had he seen the Chinese icon?

[00:13:00]Embarrassed, he had to admit, "I did not see the great wall from space." A statement important enough to make headlines. To me, what's interesting about the statement is not so much that he didn't see the wall. The stretches of the wall are long, but also really thin.

[00:13:16]Trying to spot the Chinese wall from orbit is like trying to spot a 2 cm ribbon from 500 m. It's not more visible than other man-made structures like highways.

[00:13:28]Now, what's interesting to me is that it's so important for China that they held on to the idea you could see it from space until 2003 because it's not the Chinese that invent this myth. We've seen the Europeans were obsessed by this wall. In 1754, William Stuckley wrote that the wall may be discerned at the moon.

[00:13:50]Now, William doesn't sound too certain, but over time, this will change. In a 1923 issue of National Geographic, you have an article that opens like this.

[00:14:00]According to astronomers, the only work of man's hands, which would be visible to the human eye from the moon, is the Great Wall of China.

[00:14:11]Then, the very popular 1932 Ripley's cartoon, Believe It or Not, really solidifies this myth. this mightiest work of man, the only that will be visible to the human eye from the moon.

[00:14:24]See how it's now become fact? We don't even need the astronomers anymore. But for most of modern history, the Chinese didn't really care for the wall. It really doesn't feature that much in Chinese landscape art.

[00:14:37]And the last Imperial Dynasty is so big that all the walls just fall within the borders, so they're left to decay.

[00:14:43]Locals plunder the wall for building materials. When McCartney visits China, his hosts don't understand why he is so obsessed with some ruins.

[00:14:51]>> They were astonished at our curiosity.

[00:14:54]Wang and Chu, though they had passed it 20 times before, had never visited it but once.

[00:15:00]>> At the start of the 20th century, this changes. China has been humiliated by Western powers. When the last emperor falls, they need new national symbols.

[00:15:09]The Chinese see how obsessed the West is with the wall, and they start to see its potential. They start calling it the way Chang, the great long wall. All because Europeans were so obsessed with this structure. It features in propaganda posters.

[00:15:26]The communists embrace it as a national icon and start restoring it. And nowadays, it has become synonymous with all of Chinese history and the current Chinese state. So, it comes back in things like the Great Firewall.

[00:15:42]This shows just how stories can be stronger than facts. Europeans built a narrative that the decaying wall stood for a civilization that was once great.

[00:15:51]20th century Chinese made a collection of runes into a cultural icon. History is always used by people and nations to sell a certain story.

[00:16:02]Thanks for watching and I hope to see you in the next video.