The most visited stretch of the Great Wall of China is younger than the walls of the Moscow Kremlin.
Badaling was built under the Ming in the early 16th century; the Kremlin walls were finished in 1495.
The events
- The Badaling section of the Great Wallc. 1505 · Badaling, northwest of Beijing. The wall at Badaling pass was built under the Ming in the early 16th century to guard the approaches to Beijing. It was the first section restored and opened to visitors, in 1957, and hundreds of millions of people and many heads of state have walked it since.
- Building the brick walls of the Moscow Kremlin1485–1495 · Moscow Kremlin. In 1485–1495, under Ivan III, Italian masters including Pietro Antonio Solari built the new brick walls and towers of the Moscow Kremlin. The fortress survives to this day.
More amazing facts
- 1492 1492: Granada fell in January, Columbus reached the Americas in October, and in November the Ensisheim meteorite fell in Alsace — one of Europe's oldest witnessed falls.
- 1492 The oldest surviving globe was made in 1492, and America is not on it. Martin Behaim finished his "Erdapfel" in Nuremberg before Columbus returned; between Europe and Asia it shows only ocean and islands.
- 1492 Before 1492 Italy had no tomatoes, Ireland no potatoes, Switzerland no cocoa, and Thailand and India no chilli peppers.
- 1492 Columbus's critics were right — about size, not shape.
- 1494 · 1497 Ivan III's law code (1497) appeared three years after Spain and Portugal divided the world between them at Tordesillas.
- 1494 Leonardo da Vinci's maths teacher is the "father of accounting". In 1494 Luca Pacioli was the first to describe double-entry bookkeeping in a printed book — the debit-and-credit system still used today.