Great Wall Facts

Great Wall Facts include the basic information of the Great Wall  and some fun facts, such as Why was the Great Wall built, are there bodies buried in the Wall, and can you really see the Great Wall from outer space? Check this page if you want to learn more about this oldest, largest, and most celebrated achievements of human ingenuity.

Basic Information

Other name 万里长城 (Wàn-Lǐ Chángchéng /wann-lee channg-chnng/ ‘Ten-Thousand-Li-Long Wall’, i.e. ‘the 5,000-Kilometer-Long Wall’)
Total length 21,196.18 km (13,170.7 miles)
How old is the Great Wall? More than 2,300 years
Location The Wall crosses 9 provinces and municipalities: Liaoning, Hebei, Tianjin, Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Ningxia, Gansu.
Mostly visted section Badaling Great Wall, with 70,000 per day in the Chinese Golden week in October.
Disappeared section Nearly 1/3 of the Great Wall
 Average height 6 to 7 meters
 The highest section around 8 metres (26 ft)
 The widest section around 9 metres (30 ft)
How many people invloved in the construction More than 1,000, 000 laborers
 Relics of Ming Dynasty Great Wall 8,851 km (5,500 miles)
When was it listed as World Heritage  In December 1987 

Interesting Facts of the Great Wall

  • It’s not one continuous wall:Rather than being one long continuous wall, the Great Wall of China is made up of a number of different sections. These sections were built by various dynasties over a long period of time from stone and other materials.

  • Its main purpose was protection against attacks and invasions from the north. However, it never stopped an invasion.

  • The Wall does not contain corpses: A large number of workers have lost their lives while building the wall. Ancient rumours speak of labourers being buried in the Wall is not ture. No bones have ever been found in the Wall and there is no evidence, written or archaeological, for the slander.

  • Major rebuilding of the Great Wall of China took place during the Ming Dynasty that began in the 14th century. Construction during this time was strong due to the use of stone and brick.

  • What we see now is relatively new: Some of the well maintained areas of the wall, such as those near Beijing, are popular tourist destinations. While some parts of the wall have been preserved or renovated, other parts have been vandalised or destroyed to make way for construction.

  • It cannot be seen from the Moon: Rumours that astronauts can see the Great Wall of China from the Moon with the naked eye are untrue. 

  • It is not a wall: Well, the Ming bits around Beijing are, but out west, brick and stone give way to earth: sometimes moulded by the elements into camel’s humps; sometimes no more than a gentle bank; sometimes nothing at all. And there is much more to the Wall than walls or banks: fortresses, barracks, guard-towers and beacon-towers stalk the main lines of the Wall in a sort of stretched-out halo.

  • There’s more than one Wall: The Wall is not an “it”. It’s a “them”, in the plural. They are in bits, and very few of them look like the glorious creation to which tourists go.

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