The Great Wall of postcards is younger than it looks: most of its brick sections were built under the Ming, after 1368.
The wall of the 3rd century BC survives mostly as earthen ramparts.
The events
- Great Wall of Chinac. 214 BC · Northern China. Qin Shi Huang ordered the border walls of the former states joined into one line against the Xiongnu nomads, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Later dynasties, above all the Ming, rebuilt it, and with all its branches it exceeds 20,000 km.
- Founding of the Ming dynasty1368 · Nanjing. Rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang drove out the Mongols and proclaimed the Ming dynasty with its capital at Nanjing. The Ming ruled China for nearly three centuries, rebuilding the Great Wall and raising the Forbidden City in Beijing.
3rd century BC · 14th century · 17th century
More amazing facts
- 240 BC Around 240 BC, Eratosthenes measured the Earth's circumference in Egypt, while Chinese chroniclers made the first sure record of Halley's Comet.
- 240 BC An Egyptian king kept the original scripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and simply forfeited a huge deposit.
- 218 BC · 214 BC Hannibal took elephants over the Alps at almost the same time China began its Great Wall.
- 210 BC China's First Emperor sought immortality and may have been poisoned by it: one theory blames a mercury elixir from his alchemists.
- 202 BC In 202 BC, empires were decided at both ends of Eurasia: Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama, and Liu Bang founded the Han dynasty.
- 196 BC · 1802 The British Museum's most visited object is a piece of bureaucracy: the Rosetta Stone bears a priestly decree honouring Ptolemy V, repeated in three scripts, and has been on display almost continuously since 1802.