The Great Wall of China : from history to myth / Arthur Waldron.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 256-278) and index.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on romanization
1. Introduction: what is the Great Wall of China?
Part I. First Considerations: 2. Early Chinese walls
3. Strategic origins of Chinese walls
Part II, the Making of the Great Wall: 4. Geography and strategy: the importance of the Ordos
5. Security without walls: early Ming strategy and its collapse
6. Toward a new strategy: the Ordos crisis and the first walls
7. Politics and military policy at the turn of the sixteenth century
8. The second debate over the Ordos
9. The heyday of wall-building
Part III. The Significance of Wall-Building: 10. The Great Wall and foreign policy: the problem of compromise
11. The Wall acquires new meanings
Notes
Bibliography
Chinese and Japanese materials
Western materials
Glossary
Index.

This is the first full scholarly study of the Great Wall of China to appear in any language, and it challenges many deeply held ideas about Chinese history. Drawing both on primary sources and on the latest archaeology, the book first demonstrates that the standard account of the Great Wall is untrue and misleading and then presents a convincing new account. It begins by tracing the various walls and systems of frontier defences that existed in early Chinese history, and shows how the greatest of these achieved a mythical symbolic stature which long survived the Wall itself. A striking concluding chapter traces how the true history of the Wall was lost in the early twentieth century as it was gradually transformed into a Chinese national symbol explained through historical myth. The book is an important contribution to the history of China's defensive policy, and her ideological attitudes, and will be of interest both to students of Chinese history and of international relations in the pre-modern world.

Another copy O'Neill Library

Local access dig.pdf. [Waldron-Great Wall of China.pdf]