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

But behind the wall’s intimidating exterior—and the myths that have built up around it—is a complex history that has both defined & undermined China. Author Julia Lovell has written a new & important history of the Great Wall that guides the reader through the conquests & cataclysms of the Chinese empire, from the second millennium BC to the present day.

In recent years, the Wall has become an ever more potent symbol of Chinese nationalism, of a determination to resist foreign domination. But how successful was the Wall in reality, & what was its real purpose? Was it a precursor, albeit on a huge scale, of the Berlin Wall—a barrier designed to keep its population in as much as undesirables out? 

Lovell looks behind the modern mythology of the Great Wall, uncovering a three-thousand-year history far more fragmented & less illustrious than its crowds of visitors imagine today. The story of the Wall winds through that of the Chinese state & the frontier policy that defined it, through the lives of the millions of individuals who supported, criticized, built, & attacked it.