May 8, 2012 • 25 mins
Civilizations surround themselves in walls. They raise walls against enemies, against the environment and against the spirit world. In this episode, Robert and Julie examine walls, from Ming Dynasty battlements to the galactic borders of our universe.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. In
this episode, we're talking about walls, which sounds a little big,
is a big topic because we live in this world
of walls all around us. We have walls that we've erected,
(00:27):
walls that are physical walls that are made of stone,
that are made of wood, walls that are legal walls,
walls that are mental walls that are from those just
of ideas, ideas of legacy, ideas of division, hidden walls,
the walls naked to the eye, firewalls, censorship. With any
situation with the wall, you have an outsider and you
have an insider. Generally, when we're contemplating walls, were on
(00:51):
one side of the other. I guess it's possible to
stand on the top of the wall, but that's a
that's a different situation, a precarious position to be in. Yeah, right,
you don't want to star out of the wall. But
this is one of the oldest ideas really in human civilization.
But we've been building physical walls to protect cities and
towns for ages. Walled cities are one of the earliest
symbols of civilization. How do you protect a settlement against
(01:14):
marauders who were using their horses to try and steal
your agricultural excess? And in fact, the Chinese word for
city and walls is the same chain, which I found
is interesting because that's how that's how important walls were
in the emergence of cities in Chinese history. Yeah, and
if you guys haven't already figured out, we are seriously
(01:35):
talking about walls today, like the actual physical structures. One
of the things that I was thinking about is that
walls are these concrete abstractions of what I think of
as maps. Right, This this way to delineate territory, to
try to say my power base is going to be here.
And it's kind of like it's a very interesting way
that we took this abstract notion of ownership and then said, ah,
(01:59):
we'll show you will put up a wall through our points.
It's like when you're in your back seat with your
sister on a long car ride as a kid. You
each have a side of the back seat that you're
supposed to stay on, and your stuff is supposed to
stay on those sides. But during borders disputes, it becomes
necessary then to point out exactly where the line is.
It may become necessary to put some tape down that
(02:20):
line to market in the physical world, and maybe even
construct a barrier out of luggage or pillows. Yeah, and
from time to time, though, one might want to show
their might by crossing that border and knocking down luggage
and making a political statement really about how they feel
about you humming for three hours in the car, right. Yeah,
(02:41):
And then of course you end up with everything that
has a symbolic power. In human culture, walls take on
multiple purposes, and I found this particularly a telling. In
ancient Chinese tradition, you have the city gods cheng hung,
who protect the moats and walls of towns, so that
they're important because they're helping protect your very livelihood. Your
(03:02):
very life and everything you hold dear is protected by
these walls and moats, and therefore by the deity that
attends to them. But the chiang Hung also make sure
that the king of the dead doesn't take any souls
away without his permission, And so not only is he
a lord of walls and moats, he's also a lord
of death, and I find that's an interesting just symbolic
(03:23):
economy thing. What I like about this is that this
city God are these lords of walls and moats, it's
another name for them. Uh, there's a bit of bureaucracy
involved with us, and that they're usually considered to be
the reincarnation of a human being who had been an
official in earlier times. And the city God was thought
to change every three years, just like a living magistrate
(03:45):
would change office every three years. And both the magistrate
and the gods hold sway over the same administrative area.
So as you say, you know there's some supernatural areas there,
but there's this expectation that there's formal reverence paid to
the city God. So in that you see both Chinese
efficiency but also this very important notion of venerating your
(04:07):
ancestors in culture, combined in this idea that that someone
was dispatching their souls to the underworld realm. Speaking of China,
this brings us, of course to the Great Wall of China,
which is when you when you talk about walls, there
are various examples that come to mind. There's the Whaling Wall,
there's the Berlin Wall, there's Hadrian's Wall. There are plenty
of examples, but the big one the main landers of
(04:28):
the world is the Great Wall of China. And the
history of the wall is really fascinating because it's easy
to just sort of you've seen a picture of it.
You know what it looks like. You know, it's a
something to see if you're a tourist in China. But
what is it? What is its history? How is it conceived?
And the wall dates back more than two thousand years
(04:48):
to a time of unification in China, and this is
when you had the Chin dynasty uniting seven warring kingdoms
that's including itself. And if they do that, they have
all these separate walls that were built by independent kingdoms,
and so dynasty be instiling them together. And the idea
is to protect against marauders, so they can script hundreds
(05:10):
and thousands of workers. We were talking groups of prisoners,
political enemies, peasants, soldiers, and they worked for ten years
on this project. Thousands upon thousands die, as tends to happen,
and legend has it that the bones of individuals who
died constructing the wall are then then become a part
of the wall, making it in some people's words, the
(05:30):
longest cemetery on earth. Yeah, and much of this is
because this is happening during the Chin dynasty, right, And
this is again you talked about the neighboring territories that
were finally united, these little fiefdoms that had a lot
of strife, but it was united under what I guess
you could say was China's first emperor, because China wasn't
China until this. This guy united them. And when I
(05:53):
say guy, I mean thirteen year old, and this thirteen
year old is Chin Chow Wong d He is I
guess you could say a bit of a megalomaniac. He
begins to actually think about this unification and becomes obsessed
with this idea that demons in these barbarians are going
to take over China. And so that's where he mandates
(06:16):
this length of the wall to be constructed. And again
there are bits of construction of these walls throughout these
thousands of years. But this is the guy who decides
that it's really important to have from the Gobi Desert
to the Yellow Sea this fortress. Yes, it's fascinating the
idea that the wall is protecting not only against actual barbarians,
but also against demons, so that it's not just a
(06:38):
military barrier, it's a it's a spiritual barrier as well. Again,
keep in mind with all if this is two thousand
years ago, so this is a time when spiritualism, megalomania
and abuse of the peasantry we're pretty much in vogue everywhere.
So so this is, you know, not unique to China
by any aspect of the imagination, but the idea that
(06:58):
that you're you're protecting against not only things, but against ideas.
I think he's very telling because we see the symbolic
power of the wall rather overtly, as we'll see in
various examples of walls. We look at here too, when
when humans build walls, they're almost always thinking of that
symbolic power as well, not only to the outsider, and
to the outside or the wall is a clear statement
(07:18):
of hey, you're not welcome here. You stay on your
side of the back seat and I'll stay on mine.
And then to the insider, the wall says I have
built you a wall. You were protected, you were safe,
you know. It is saying there is a physical barrier
between you and the things that you were afraid of.
And you can thank me for it. Well, I mean, yeah,
it's very much like the Boogeyman, right. And to this point,
(07:42):
this emperor decided that he wanted the circuitous wall built
and not a straight path. And the reason is because
a straight line, in demonology is great for demons because
they're able to navigate only on straight lines and not
on curves. So he's gonna make it even more difficult
for these demons by making this this serpentine wall that's
(08:03):
twenty four ft high. And certainly that's one of the
things that's amazing about. Examples of the wall today and again,
examples of the wall today, as we'll discuss fees are
the wall has been added to and renovated numerous times
throughout history, so we're not necessarily talking about the same
physical wall in the same bricks. But you still see
that shape. It's like a serpent lying across the hills. Yeah,
and it is fascinating because it's one of those things
(08:24):
that people had long assumed was one big, coherent, linked
up wall, but in fact it's not. That was one
of the myths. Another myth is that you could see
this from the moon. Yeah, I see it from space
and it's it's just not so no, it's not so
lovely story, but it is lovely. But to go back
to this emperor and talk a little bit about Chinchu
Woandi and how he treated peasants. You refer to this
(08:47):
as the world's longest cemetery. At least some people have
talked about this the Great Wall of China being this Again,
he's sort of indulged in soothsaying and a little bit
of paranoia, and it is said that his sus sooth
sayer told him that the wall would actually never be built,
which he was mortally frightened of right, because the barbarians
were gonna come get him in the demons unless ten
(09:09):
thousand men were entombed in the wall. Wow, what what
sus can you imagine being that guy being on the
payroll that takes a lot of comments really to you, like,
you know, this is the message ten thousand You gotta
you gotta execute them, throw them in there. So Shinchu
Wonghdi decides, you know what, he's the ruler. He realizes
that he full well can't just spare that many men,
(09:30):
So he finds a loophole in the form of one
guy who has the word or the character for ten
thousand in his name. I guess what his fate is.
He is killed and burying the wall. Yeah, he's tossed
into the wall. But again there's this idea that this
wall begins to take on meaning of forced labor, being subjugated.
(09:51):
As you can start to see, peasants are not really
digging this wall right. The symbolic power to the insider
is not just an idea of protection, but an idea
of This is the kind of thing that governments and
rulers create out of your blood. Right. It becomes a
symbol of oppression and actually is very much a symbol
of that for a long time until we get to
(10:12):
the twentieth century. And we'll talk about that in a moment.
But let's talk about this as being an imperfect barrier.
That's the thing. Obviously the wall is important, like we said,
is an idea of protection, but does it actually offer
protection On one level, you're building these walls often at
the on the extremes there on the frontier there between
civilization and the barbarians and the demons, so you're having
(10:34):
to basically establish colonies there. I mean, think of it
in almost in terms of like an off world colony
kind of a situation. You're having to have soldiers there
that are also growing their own food, and there are
more a part of the frontier than they are of
the homeland, so they actually end up having some sort
of rapport with the local populations with the barbarians, and
(10:56):
as such are susceptible to bribes. Just here's there are
a few bucks, look the other way up while we
march an army through and join our army or join
our army, then that happens as well, So it becomes
very difficult just to to man and protect it. And
then you're gonna have gaps as well. For instance, just
in terms of the wall itself, the wall is not
you might think of the wall as being in this
(11:17):
NonStop wall that actually sneaks across the entire country, But
there are gaps in it, and there are places where
just natural barriers are depended on to to serve as
the wall well, and it has been maintained, so there
are there are parts of it that are in ruins.
So you have Genghis Khan or Genghis Khan is he
some country for two k the big g K he
(11:38):
brings with him a huge army and martial arts and
a flair for psychological terror, and he reaches the wall. Right,
and for a good hundred years, the rule of China
comes under Mongol. Yeah, they were the ones in charge
when Marco Polo visited. That's right, that's right, And so
Mongols are really taking over. But then in thirteen sixty eight,
(12:02):
a Chinese peasant leads a rebellion against Mongol rule and
this helps to establish the Ming dynasty. I only mention
this because the Ming dynasty is really important and actually
giving a lot of shoring up to the wall. Yeah,
this was thirteen sixty eight, and the Ming dynasty looks
at the wall and says, you know, this is something
we need to fix up. You need to get it
going because we don't want to be conquered by the
(12:22):
barbarians again. Right, And with it, they actually are responsible
for architectural embellishments on it and beginning to document various
points in history. So you really begin to see more
of a coherent picture of the Wall with the Ming dynasty.
But then here's another thing that happens under man Chew rule.
The wall no longer matters since the land on both
(12:42):
sides just ruled by Man Chew. When China is invaded
yet again. Yeah, this is seventeen hundreds, the Manchew invade
the Ming dynasty. The Man a number of changes to it,
added to its length, to its width, double and triple
walls in some places to really reinforce it. But then
when the Man Chow's invade in seventeen hundreds, it's largely
abandoned as a military power. It kind of stays that
way for a while, pretty much the until very recent times.
(13:05):
During that time, the wall crumbles, the wall is looted
for building supplies because you have all of these stones
right there are ready to use, and so people carry
it off to build things that are of actual value
to their lives because the walls just sitting there, it's
not even a military factor anymore. And then when Mauston
comes to power, he encourages Chinese people to use this,
(13:26):
to use the bricks, to use parts of the wall
to build things, and now brings in also this idea
of the modern you know, part of the cultural revolution,
cultural revolution, and a huge part of it is we're
going to focus on the modern China and the future China. Yeah,
we're going to obliterate the past. Right, the wall is
very much a piece of the past, and a piece
of the past that has still leaves a bad taste
(13:47):
in a lot of people's lives because it is this
thing build out of their blood. It is this symbol
of the domineering, violent rule. Yeah, it's not the one
of the wonders of the world that we now think
of it. But this it begins to to recast itself
in modern times. Right around nineteen four, there's this idea
that the wall begins to take on national pride, and
(14:09):
they actually say, let us love our country and restore
our great Wall. This becomes a big mission for them. Yeah,
you have important foreign heads of state visit. Reagan visits,
Scorba Chop visits where they go to the Great Wall.
Nixon visits. You know, and as I say, Nixon, who
wasn't he the person who said something like only a
great people could build this great wall, which starts to
(14:29):
even then recast its image. Yeah. Luckily he was a
wall enthusiast. He was all about putting Floyd but this
wall is in general. So yes, he added to that
vibe that this was something that was important and worth celebrating.
And so over the last few decades you see this
increasing restoration of portions of the wall, increased commercialization of
portions of the Wall. I'm treating. In the Lonely Planet
(14:52):
China Guide, they point out that there are sections of
the Wall that are just insanely populated. Really, I mean,
you just have tourists there almost all the time unless
you go in the dead of winter. Their gift shops,
their tourists, there are people selling things, and I mean
that's just the way it goes with popular locations. But
there are still plenty of portions of the Wall that
are not super innovated, that are still beautiful and don't
(15:14):
have like a restaurant in them. Not that their portions
of the restaurants of them, but you know what I'm saying,
don't have as in them. Yeah, there are places in
China where you can go if you look into it
and you do the research, where you can get more
of a serene views the wall as opposed to a
hyper commercialized version. But it's it's still it's even if
you go to those areas where there are a lot
of people and there's a lot of commercialization, it's still
(15:36):
a stunning site. Indeed. All right, we're gonna take a
quick break, and when we come back, we're going to
move beyond the Great Wall of China and discuss some
more modern examples of walls in our lives, including cosmic walls.
All right, we're back. So when you think beyond the
Great Wall of China and you think of modern walls,
what comes to mind? Okay, Well, I mean, you know,
(15:58):
I think about Berlin Wall. I also think about the
Atlantic Wall that Hitler was. I think it's like eight
hundred miles of sea coast, at least in France that
he had been constructing as a barrier of and and
a bit of military might. Yeah, the stuff from saving
brabt Ryan of remember that. Yeah. But of course, here
(16:18):
in the US, one of the most strikingly obvious walls
is more like a fence. The US Mexico border. Well
we call it offense, but it sure as heck looks
like a wall in many areas. And it's been in
the news a lot, especially with the conservative primaries leading
up to this year's presidential election. You've had a lot
of people touched on this as a hot is a
hot topic issue immigration in the United States. A lot
(16:40):
of our listeners are US based, but a lot of
you are based in other countries. US Mexican migrations are
very much on voters minds, especially conservative voters. So you
have people like Herman Kane, the pizza mogul, who came
out and said we're going to build an electric fence
made out of pizza, not made out of pizza. He
did not rule out alligators, as I remember, so moats
and walls, and then there were some other half cocked
(17:03):
ideas that were thrown around by some other candidates, but
it all comes down to this idea of the wall
right sending this message to Mexico, saying Mexicans are not
wanted here, and sending more importantly really, because these are
politicians talking about wall building, sending this message to their
constituents in the US to say we care about what
you care about so much that we built this thing.
(17:25):
We're going to erect this giant symbol of what we're
talking about, even though their YouTube videos of people scaling
up these things up and over them in seconds, and
and it's the same situations coming to play that came
into play with the Great Wall of China. They're gonna
be gaps. They're gonna be places where care of the
border is either less maintained or or it is not
maintained at all. Well, here's the thing. Last year was
(17:47):
the biggest sustained drop in immigration from Mexico to the
United States, leave to be surpassed and scale only by
losses in the Mexican born US population during the Great Depression.
So we're actually seeing a drop in immigration to the
United States from Mexico. And much of this is because well,
(18:08):
first of all, the Mexican cartel are are acting as
border agents on the Mexican border, and they're demanding money,
and sometimes they actually use immigrants as drug mules, so
it's become far more dangerous as if it weren't already
to try to cross. But also um on the U.
S side, it's become much more difficult and rigorous in
terms of trying to prosecute people for for doing this.
(18:31):
But of course there's been an economic downturn as well,
and also you can factor and changes in legislation in
some of the southern states that have cracked down on
the use of migrant labor. Right, Yeah, So it is
one of those things that we wanted to point out
because it is a huge symbolic effort by the United States,
but in terms of efficacy and really getting at the
(18:53):
what they think, or what the United States politicians think
is the root problem doesn't isn't really solved by this
right and and those some people may have giggled at
the idea of building a wall to keep demons at bay.
Like I said, that is just an avert statement of
what all walls ultimately symbolized, Like even this wall is
about keeping demons of the mind at bay. To some
(19:14):
people on the inside, it is a demonization of the
threats that in a simple vocation of the threats that
that lie outside and are waiting to get in. It's
also worth noting, though, that when you build walls or
fences of this nature, you're building them in environments that
did not previously have barriers, So you're you're going to
cut into not only the migration of people, but the
(19:35):
migration of animals. So there have been a number of
studies that have looked into what effects order fences on
the US Mexican border have had on migrating animals, and
it doesn't paint a pretty picture, you know, I mean,
you're altering the psychic and the geographical landscape, right. Yeah,
And it's interestingly mentioned the psychic because that was one
of the things that has also been brought up about
the Great Wall of China and throughout China's history, that
(19:56):
there were people who thought of it as a disruptor
of g You know, this is disrupt disrupting the earth energies.
You're building this unnatural thing that breaks up natural flows
in the environment. Of course, we raise the walls not
only against human and imagined threats, we also raised them
against mother nature. In Japan, the sea walls because as
(20:18):
an island nation and given its past history with threats
from the sea, you want to be able to mitigate
that to some degree. Nearly half of the twenty two
thousand mile coast in Japan actually has concrete sea walls,
which would make sense, right because I mean that there's
a lot of earthquake activity in that area and you
would want to have some sort of structure try to
(20:39):
protect you from really high waves. So there's something very
practical about it. But some people, the opponents of it,
say that it's not necessarily that effective, and in fact
we saw that with a tsunami. They are fascinating constructions though,
that well worth doing a Google image search on because
if you've never seen when, you may imagine just a
straight up wall, but there are a lot different because
(20:59):
stopping of flow, a massive flow of water, is different
than stopping some marauders on horseback. It's not just about
putting up the straight barrier, but putting up a structure
that will slow and halt this approach of water. And
that's what proponents say. They say, Okay, well, maybe it
didn't safeguard us against the nuclear reactors, right seawater got
in there. The wall wasn't actually high enough. It should
(21:20):
have been built much higher, but it did slow down
the encroachment of those waves. Sometimes, you know, it gave
people a couple of extra minutes to try to evacuate,
which is, you know, the difference between life and death.
And another example of walls that comes to mind if
you think back to our episode on the black Blizzards
of the of the Great Depression of the dust Bowl,
(21:41):
we mentioned the green walls that you see popping up
in some portions on green wall projects in China in Africa,
and the idea here is building a wall against desertification,
building a wall that will try to prevent the desert
from encroaching on fertile lands. Yeah, there's something called the
Yellow Dragon. And each spring, the dust from China's northern
(22:01):
deserts are swept up by the wind and whipped eastward,
and they blast into Beijing and they blank at the
city in a huge coat of dust particles. And that
has actually created a lot of respiratory ailments in the
dust of also clogged machinery and posted down airports and
destroys crops. I mean, it's a very serious problem. And
(22:22):
really we see walls everywhere in the world around us.
We see walls in our body, cell membranes, our skin
even is often seen as a wall, even though when
you actually examine it, we're talking about a porous layer.
Things move in and out off, there's a lot of traffics.
It's kind of like the Great Wall of China in
that regard. It's not not a perfect barrier by any stretch.
There are gaps, there are ways to negotiate your way
(22:43):
inside and more like calanders, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, and
not only when we're looking in our inward, but when
we're looking outward as well. There's something called the Sloane
Great Wall. And this is a far distant grouping of
galaxies that spans over one billion light years. It's longer
than any quote unquote structure ever measured. And I put
(23:03):
structure in quotes because it's kind of hard to argue
this is actually a structure. These are clusters of galaxies,
so it's more it's no more a structure really than
a constellation in the sky. It's a structure. But we're
so fascinated with walls when we define our limits on
things through the symbol and the language of walls. So
as we stare out at these distant clusters of galaxies,
(23:25):
we can't help but think of them in terms of walls. Well,
and I guess we could say these are sort of
cosmic webs, right, and they do create borders between things. Yeah,
there's void beyond them. They're known as phalactic filament, so
that's not like filaments in a giant light bulb the
size of the moon or anything. They're actually known to
span these vast distances and they're lattice like structures. And
(23:47):
the cool thing about these filaments is that they are
integral to the evolution of galaxy clusters in the way
that they form. So there you have it, Walls. I
would be remiss if I didn't mention Game of Thrones
real quick finger with this book series, h and HBO
TV series. I have heard you speak of it, and
I know of it. I have not seen it that well,
it's very entertaining and part of the plot revolves arounding
(24:10):
northern Wall that is built against our barians and demons,
though in this case built out of ice, and the
series explore some of the ideas of at least the
military ideas that we discuss with a Great Wall of China,
like how do you maintain it? How does a political
climate affect the maintenance and the staffing of the wall,
and then is it ultimately an effective barrier against these
(24:32):
outside forces? Well, I'm just gonna guess, Well, it would
make a good story. How would you write seven books
about it? Um? Seven plus books about it? If that's
how you would do it? Well, Hey, if if you
have something you would like to share about walls, your
own experience with walls, a wall that you found particularly
mind blowing, a concept of a wall and reality or
fiction that you have some thoughts on, let us know
(24:52):
about it. You can always find us on Facebook where
we are Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and you can
find us on Twitter where our handle is blow the Mind.
And please do drop us a line. You can do
that at blow the Mind at discovery dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, is it
how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. In
this episode, we're talking about walls, which sounds a little big,
is a big topic because we live in this world
of walls all around us. We have walls that we've erected,
(00:27):
walls that are physical walls that are made of stone,
that are made of wood, walls that are legal walls,
walls that are mental walls that are from those just
of ideas, ideas of legacy, ideas of division, hidden walls,
the walls naked to the eye, firewalls, censorship. With any
situation with the wall, you have an outsider and you
have an insider. Generally, when we're contemplating walls, were on
(00:51):
one side of the other. I guess it's possible to
stand on the top of the wall, but that's a
that's a different situation, a precarious position to be in. Yeah, right,
you don't want to star out of the wall. But
this is one of the oldest ideas really in human civilization.
But we've been building physical walls to protect cities and
towns for ages. Walled cities are one of the earliest
symbols of civilization. How do you protect a settlement against
(01:14):
marauders who were using their horses to try and steal
your agricultural excess? And in fact, the Chinese word for
city and walls is the same chain, which I found
is interesting because that's how that's how important walls were
in the emergence of cities in Chinese history. Yeah, and
if you guys haven't already figured out, we are seriously
(01:35):
talking about walls today, like the actual physical structures. One
of the things that I was thinking about is that
walls are these concrete abstractions of what I think of
as maps. Right, This this way to delineate territory, to
try to say my power base is going to be here.
And it's kind of like it's a very interesting way
that we took this abstract notion of ownership and then said, ah,
(01:59):
we'll show you will put up a wall through our points.
It's like when you're in your back seat with your
sister on a long car ride as a kid. You
each have a side of the back seat that you're
supposed to stay on, and your stuff is supposed to
stay on those sides. But during borders disputes, it becomes
necessary then to point out exactly where the line is.
It may become necessary to put some tape down that
(02:20):
line to market in the physical world, and maybe even
construct a barrier out of luggage or pillows. Yeah, and
from time to time, though, one might want to show
their might by crossing that border and knocking down luggage
and making a political statement really about how they feel
about you humming for three hours in the car, right. Yeah,
(02:41):
And then of course you end up with everything that
has a symbolic power. In human culture, walls take on
multiple purposes, and I found this particularly a telling. In
ancient Chinese tradition, you have the city gods cheng hung,
who protect the moats and walls of towns, so that
they're important because they're helping protect your very livelihood. Your
(03:02):
very life and everything you hold dear is protected by
these walls and moats, and therefore by the deity that
attends to them. But the chiang Hung also make sure
that the king of the dead doesn't take any souls
away without his permission, And so not only is he
a lord of walls and moats, he's also a lord
of death, and I find that's an interesting just symbolic
(03:23):
economy thing. What I like about this is that this
city God are these lords of walls and moats, it's
another name for them. Uh, there's a bit of bureaucracy
involved with us, and that they're usually considered to be
the reincarnation of a human being who had been an
official in earlier times. And the city God was thought
to change every three years, just like a living magistrate
(03:45):
would change office every three years. And both the magistrate
and the gods hold sway over the same administrative area.
So as you say, you know there's some supernatural areas there,
but there's this expectation that there's formal reverence paid to
the city God. So in that you see both Chinese
efficiency but also this very important notion of venerating your
(04:07):
ancestors in culture, combined in this idea that that someone
was dispatching their souls to the underworld realm. Speaking of China,
this brings us, of course to the Great Wall of China,
which is when you when you talk about walls, there
are various examples that come to mind. There's the Whaling Wall,
there's the Berlin Wall, there's Hadrian's Wall. There are plenty
of examples, but the big one the main landers of
(04:28):
the world is the Great Wall of China. And the
history of the wall is really fascinating because it's easy
to just sort of you've seen a picture of it.
You know what it looks like. You know, it's a
something to see if you're a tourist in China. But
what is it? What is its history? How is it conceived?
And the wall dates back more than two thousand years
(04:48):
to a time of unification in China, and this is
when you had the Chin dynasty uniting seven warring kingdoms
that's including itself. And if they do that, they have
all these separate walls that were built by independent kingdoms,
and so dynasty be instiling them together. And the idea
is to protect against marauders, so they can script hundreds
(05:10):
and thousands of workers. We were talking groups of prisoners,
political enemies, peasants, soldiers, and they worked for ten years
on this project. Thousands upon thousands die, as tends to happen,
and legend has it that the bones of individuals who
died constructing the wall are then then become a part
of the wall, making it in some people's words, the
(05:30):
longest cemetery on earth. Yeah, and much of this is
because this is happening during the Chin dynasty, right, And
this is again you talked about the neighboring territories that
were finally united, these little fiefdoms that had a lot
of strife, but it was united under what I guess
you could say was China's first emperor, because China wasn't
China until this. This guy united them. And when I
(05:53):
say guy, I mean thirteen year old, and this thirteen
year old is Chin Chow Wong d He is I
guess you could say a bit of a megalomaniac. He
begins to actually think about this unification and becomes obsessed
with this idea that demons in these barbarians are going
to take over China. And so that's where he mandates
(06:16):
this length of the wall to be constructed. And again
there are bits of construction of these walls throughout these
thousands of years. But this is the guy who decides
that it's really important to have from the Gobi Desert
to the Yellow Sea this fortress. Yes, it's fascinating the
idea that the wall is protecting not only against actual barbarians,
but also against demons, so that it's not just a
(06:38):
military barrier, it's a it's a spiritual barrier as well. Again,
keep in mind with all if this is two thousand
years ago, so this is a time when spiritualism, megalomania
and abuse of the peasantry we're pretty much in vogue everywhere.
So so this is, you know, not unique to China
by any aspect of the imagination, but the idea that
(06:58):
that you're you're protecting against not only things, but against ideas.
I think he's very telling because we see the symbolic
power of the wall rather overtly, as we'll see in
various examples of walls. We look at here too, when
when humans build walls, they're almost always thinking of that
symbolic power as well, not only to the outsider, and
to the outside or the wall is a clear statement
(07:18):
of hey, you're not welcome here. You stay on your
side of the back seat and I'll stay on mine.
And then to the insider, the wall says I have
built you a wall. You were protected, you were safe,
you know. It is saying there is a physical barrier
between you and the things that you were afraid of.
And you can thank me for it. Well, I mean, yeah,
it's very much like the Boogeyman, right. And to this point,
(07:42):
this emperor decided that he wanted the circuitous wall built
and not a straight path. And the reason is because
a straight line, in demonology is great for demons because
they're able to navigate only on straight lines and not
on curves. So he's gonna make it even more difficult
for these demons by making this this serpentine wall that's
(08:03):
twenty four ft high. And certainly that's one of the
things that's amazing about. Examples of the wall today and again,
examples of the wall today, as we'll discuss fees are
the wall has been added to and renovated numerous times
throughout history, so we're not necessarily talking about the same
physical wall in the same bricks. But you still see
that shape. It's like a serpent lying across the hills. Yeah,
and it is fascinating because it's one of those things
(08:24):
that people had long assumed was one big, coherent, linked
up wall, but in fact it's not. That was one
of the myths. Another myth is that you could see
this from the moon. Yeah, I see it from space
and it's it's just not so no, it's not so
lovely story, but it is lovely. But to go back
to this emperor and talk a little bit about Chinchu
Woandi and how he treated peasants. You refer to this
(08:47):
as the world's longest cemetery. At least some people have
talked about this the Great Wall of China being this Again,
he's sort of indulged in soothsaying and a little bit
of paranoia, and it is said that his sus sooth
sayer told him that the wall would actually never be built,
which he was mortally frightened of right, because the barbarians
were gonna come get him in the demons unless ten
(09:09):
thousand men were entombed in the wall. Wow, what what
sus can you imagine being that guy being on the
payroll that takes a lot of comments really to you, like,
you know, this is the message ten thousand You gotta
you gotta execute them, throw them in there. So Shinchu
Wonghdi decides, you know what, he's the ruler. He realizes
that he full well can't just spare that many men,
(09:30):
So he finds a loophole in the form of one
guy who has the word or the character for ten
thousand in his name. I guess what his fate is.
He is killed and burying the wall. Yeah, he's tossed
into the wall. But again there's this idea that this
wall begins to take on meaning of forced labor, being subjugated.
(09:51):
As you can start to see, peasants are not really
digging this wall right. The symbolic power to the insider
is not just an idea of protection, but an idea
of This is the kind of thing that governments and
rulers create out of your blood. Right. It becomes a
symbol of oppression and actually is very much a symbol
of that for a long time until we get to
(10:12):
the twentieth century. And we'll talk about that in a moment.
But let's talk about this as being an imperfect barrier.
That's the thing. Obviously the wall is important, like we said,
is an idea of protection, but does it actually offer
protection On one level, you're building these walls often at
the on the extremes there on the frontier there between
civilization and the barbarians and the demons, so you're having
(10:34):
to basically establish colonies there. I mean, think of it
in almost in terms of like an off world colony
kind of a situation. You're having to have soldiers there
that are also growing their own food, and there are
more a part of the frontier than they are of
the homeland, so they actually end up having some sort
of rapport with the local populations with the barbarians, and
(10:56):
as such are susceptible to bribes. Just here's there are
a few bucks, look the other way up while we
march an army through and join our army or join
our army, then that happens as well, So it becomes
very difficult just to to man and protect it. And
then you're gonna have gaps as well. For instance, just
in terms of the wall itself, the wall is not
you might think of the wall as being in this
(11:17):
NonStop wall that actually sneaks across the entire country, But
there are gaps in it, and there are places where
just natural barriers are depended on to to serve as
the wall well, and it has been maintained, so there
are there are parts of it that are in ruins.
So you have Genghis Khan or Genghis Khan is he
some country for two k the big g K he
(11:38):
brings with him a huge army and martial arts and
a flair for psychological terror, and he reaches the wall. Right,
and for a good hundred years, the rule of China
comes under Mongol. Yeah, they were the ones in charge
when Marco Polo visited. That's right, that's right, And so
Mongols are really taking over. But then in thirteen sixty eight,
(12:02):
a Chinese peasant leads a rebellion against Mongol rule and
this helps to establish the Ming dynasty. I only mention
this because the Ming dynasty is really important and actually
giving a lot of shoring up to the wall. Yeah,
this was thirteen sixty eight, and the Ming dynasty looks
at the wall and says, you know, this is something
we need to fix up. You need to get it
going because we don't want to be conquered by the
(12:22):
barbarians again. Right, And with it, they actually are responsible
for architectural embellishments on it and beginning to document various
points in history. So you really begin to see more
of a coherent picture of the Wall with the Ming dynasty.
But then here's another thing that happens under man Chew rule.
The wall no longer matters since the land on both
(12:42):
sides just ruled by Man Chew. When China is invaded
yet again. Yeah, this is seventeen hundreds, the Manchew invade
the Ming dynasty. The Man a number of changes to it,
added to its length, to its width, double and triple
walls in some places to really reinforce it. But then
when the Man Chow's invade in seventeen hundreds, it's largely
abandoned as a military power. It kind of stays that
way for a while, pretty much the until very recent times.
(13:05):
During that time, the wall crumbles, the wall is looted
for building supplies because you have all of these stones
right there are ready to use, and so people carry
it off to build things that are of actual value
to their lives because the walls just sitting there, it's
not even a military factor anymore. And then when Mauston
comes to power, he encourages Chinese people to use this,
(13:26):
to use the bricks, to use parts of the wall
to build things, and now brings in also this idea
of the modern you know, part of the cultural revolution,
cultural revolution, and a huge part of it is we're
going to focus on the modern China and the future China. Yeah,
we're going to obliterate the past. Right, the wall is
very much a piece of the past, and a piece
of the past that has still leaves a bad taste
(13:47):
in a lot of people's lives because it is this
thing build out of their blood. It is this symbol
of the domineering, violent rule. Yeah, it's not the one
of the wonders of the world that we now think
of it. But this it begins to to recast itself
in modern times. Right around nineteen four, there's this idea
that the wall begins to take on national pride, and
(14:09):
they actually say, let us love our country and restore
our great Wall. This becomes a big mission for them. Yeah,
you have important foreign heads of state visit. Reagan visits,
Scorba Chop visits where they go to the Great Wall.
Nixon visits. You know, and as I say, Nixon, who
wasn't he the person who said something like only a
great people could build this great wall, which starts to
(14:29):
even then recast its image. Yeah. Luckily he was a
wall enthusiast. He was all about putting Floyd but this
wall is in general. So yes, he added to that
vibe that this was something that was important and worth celebrating.
And so over the last few decades you see this
increasing restoration of portions of the wall, increased commercialization of
portions of the Wall. I'm treating. In the Lonely Planet
(14:52):
China Guide, they point out that there are sections of
the Wall that are just insanely populated. Really, I mean,
you just have tourists there almost all the time unless
you go in the dead of winter. Their gift shops,
their tourists, there are people selling things, and I mean
that's just the way it goes with popular locations. But
there are still plenty of portions of the Wall that
are not super innovated, that are still beautiful and don't
(15:14):
have like a restaurant in them. Not that their portions
of the restaurants of them, but you know what I'm saying,
don't have as in them. Yeah, there are places in
China where you can go if you look into it
and you do the research, where you can get more
of a serene views the wall as opposed to a
hyper commercialized version. But it's it's still it's even if
you go to those areas where there are a lot
of people and there's a lot of commercialization, it's still
(15:36):
a stunning site. Indeed. All right, we're gonna take a
quick break, and when we come back, we're going to
move beyond the Great Wall of China and discuss some
more modern examples of walls in our lives, including cosmic walls.
All right, we're back. So when you think beyond the
Great Wall of China and you think of modern walls,
what comes to mind? Okay, Well, I mean, you know,
(15:58):
I think about Berlin Wall. I also think about the
Atlantic Wall that Hitler was. I think it's like eight
hundred miles of sea coast, at least in France that
he had been constructing as a barrier of and and
a bit of military might. Yeah, the stuff from saving
brabt Ryan of remember that. Yeah. But of course, here
(16:18):
in the US, one of the most strikingly obvious walls
is more like a fence. The US Mexico border. Well
we call it offense, but it sure as heck looks
like a wall in many areas. And it's been in
the news a lot, especially with the conservative primaries leading
up to this year's presidential election. You've had a lot
of people touched on this as a hot is a
hot topic issue immigration in the United States. A lot
(16:40):
of our listeners are US based, but a lot of
you are based in other countries. US Mexican migrations are
very much on voters minds, especially conservative voters. So you
have people like Herman Kane, the pizza mogul, who came
out and said we're going to build an electric fence
made out of pizza, not made out of pizza. He
did not rule out alligators, as I remember, so moats
and walls, and then there were some other half cocked
(17:03):
ideas that were thrown around by some other candidates, but
it all comes down to this idea of the wall
right sending this message to Mexico, saying Mexicans are not
wanted here, and sending more importantly really, because these are
politicians talking about wall building, sending this message to their
constituents in the US to say we care about what
you care about so much that we built this thing.
(17:25):
We're going to erect this giant symbol of what we're
talking about, even though their YouTube videos of people scaling
up these things up and over them in seconds, and
and it's the same situations coming to play that came
into play with the Great Wall of China. They're gonna
be gaps. They're gonna be places where care of the
border is either less maintained or or it is not
maintained at all. Well, here's the thing. Last year was
(17:47):
the biggest sustained drop in immigration from Mexico to the
United States, leave to be surpassed and scale only by
losses in the Mexican born US population during the Great Depression.
So we're actually seeing a drop in immigration to the
United States from Mexico. And much of this is because well,
(18:08):
first of all, the Mexican cartel are are acting as
border agents on the Mexican border, and they're demanding money,
and sometimes they actually use immigrants as drug mules, so
it's become far more dangerous as if it weren't already
to try to cross. But also um on the U.
S side, it's become much more difficult and rigorous in
terms of trying to prosecute people for for doing this.
(18:31):
But of course there's been an economic downturn as well,
and also you can factor and changes in legislation in
some of the southern states that have cracked down on
the use of migrant labor. Right, Yeah, So it is
one of those things that we wanted to point out
because it is a huge symbolic effort by the United States,
but in terms of efficacy and really getting at the
(18:53):
what they think, or what the United States politicians think
is the root problem doesn't isn't really solved by this
right and and those some people may have giggled at
the idea of building a wall to keep demons at bay.
Like I said, that is just an avert statement of
what all walls ultimately symbolized, Like even this wall is
about keeping demons of the mind at bay. To some
(19:14):
people on the inside, it is a demonization of the
threats that in a simple vocation of the threats that
that lie outside and are waiting to get in. It's
also worth noting, though, that when you build walls or
fences of this nature, you're building them in environments that
did not previously have barriers, So you're you're going to
cut into not only the migration of people, but the
(19:35):
migration of animals. So there have been a number of
studies that have looked into what effects order fences on
the US Mexican border have had on migrating animals, and
it doesn't paint a pretty picture, you know, I mean,
you're altering the psychic and the geographical landscape, right. Yeah,
And it's interestingly mentioned the psychic because that was one
of the things that has also been brought up about
the Great Wall of China and throughout China's history, that
(19:56):
there were people who thought of it as a disruptor
of g You know, this is disrupt disrupting the earth energies.
You're building this unnatural thing that breaks up natural flows
in the environment. Of course, we raise the walls not
only against human and imagined threats, we also raised them
against mother nature. In Japan, the sea walls because as
(20:18):
an island nation and given its past history with threats
from the sea, you want to be able to mitigate
that to some degree. Nearly half of the twenty two
thousand mile coast in Japan actually has concrete sea walls,
which would make sense, right because I mean that there's
a lot of earthquake activity in that area and you
would want to have some sort of structure try to
(20:39):
protect you from really high waves. So there's something very
practical about it. But some people, the opponents of it,
say that it's not necessarily that effective, and in fact
we saw that with a tsunami. They are fascinating constructions though,
that well worth doing a Google image search on because
if you've never seen when, you may imagine just a
straight up wall, but there are a lot different because
(20:59):
stopping of flow, a massive flow of water, is different
than stopping some marauders on horseback. It's not just about
putting up the straight barrier, but putting up a structure
that will slow and halt this approach of water. And
that's what proponents say. They say, Okay, well, maybe it
didn't safeguard us against the nuclear reactors, right seawater got
in there. The wall wasn't actually high enough. It should
(21:20):
have been built much higher, but it did slow down
the encroachment of those waves. Sometimes, you know, it gave
people a couple of extra minutes to try to evacuate,
which is, you know, the difference between life and death.
And another example of walls that comes to mind if
you think back to our episode on the black Blizzards
of the of the Great Depression of the dust Bowl,
(21:41):
we mentioned the green walls that you see popping up
in some portions on green wall projects in China in Africa,
and the idea here is building a wall against desertification,
building a wall that will try to prevent the desert
from encroaching on fertile lands. Yeah, there's something called the
Yellow Dragon. And each spring, the dust from China's northern
(22:01):
deserts are swept up by the wind and whipped eastward,
and they blast into Beijing and they blank at the
city in a huge coat of dust particles. And that
has actually created a lot of respiratory ailments in the
dust of also clogged machinery and posted down airports and
destroys crops. I mean, it's a very serious problem. And
(22:22):
really we see walls everywhere in the world around us.
We see walls in our body, cell membranes, our skin
even is often seen as a wall, even though when
you actually examine it, we're talking about a porous layer.
Things move in and out off, there's a lot of traffics.
It's kind of like the Great Wall of China in
that regard. It's not not a perfect barrier by any stretch.
There are gaps, there are ways to negotiate your way
(22:43):
inside and more like calanders, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, and
not only when we're looking in our inward, but when
we're looking outward as well. There's something called the Sloane
Great Wall. And this is a far distant grouping of
galaxies that spans over one billion light years. It's longer
than any quote unquote structure ever measured. And I put
(23:03):
structure in quotes because it's kind of hard to argue
this is actually a structure. These are clusters of galaxies,
so it's more it's no more a structure really than
a constellation in the sky. It's a structure. But we're
so fascinated with walls when we define our limits on
things through the symbol and the language of walls. So
as we stare out at these distant clusters of galaxies,
(23:25):
we can't help but think of them in terms of walls. Well,
and I guess we could say these are sort of
cosmic webs, right, and they do create borders between things. Yeah,
there's void beyond them. They're known as phalactic filament, so
that's not like filaments in a giant light bulb the
size of the moon or anything. They're actually known to
span these vast distances and they're lattice like structures. And
(23:47):
the cool thing about these filaments is that they are
integral to the evolution of galaxy clusters in the way
that they form. So there you have it, Walls. I
would be remiss if I didn't mention Game of Thrones
real quick finger with this book series, h and HBO
TV series. I have heard you speak of it, and
I know of it. I have not seen it that well,
it's very entertaining and part of the plot revolves arounding
(24:10):
northern Wall that is built against our barians and demons,
though in this case built out of ice, and the
series explore some of the ideas of at least the
military ideas that we discuss with a Great Wall of China,
like how do you maintain it? How does a political
climate affect the maintenance and the staffing of the wall,
and then is it ultimately an effective barrier against these
(24:32):
outside forces? Well, I'm just gonna guess, Well, it would
make a good story. How would you write seven books
about it? Um? Seven plus books about it? If that's
how you would do it? Well, Hey, if if you
have something you would like to share about walls, your
own experience with walls, a wall that you found particularly
mind blowing, a concept of a wall and reality or
fiction that you have some thoughts on, let us know
(24:52):
about it. You can always find us on Facebook where
we are Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and you can
find us on Twitter where our handle is blow the Mind.
And please do drop us a line. You can do
that at blow the Mind at discovery dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, is it
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