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3.1 Myths about the Great WallThe first great myth about the Great Wall is as previosly mentioned its singularity, that the term meaningfully refers to one ancient structure with a coherently chronicled past. In contrast to the popular prestige and renown the wall has recently enjoyed, references to the Chinese term now universally translated as Great Wall, Changcheng, in pre-modern sources are scattered and inconclusive. This term was initially used in the first century BC to refer to walls built in the previous two centuries, the term rarely crops up between the end of the Han (206 BC - 220 AD) and the beginning of the Ming (1368 - 1644) dynasties. Frontier walls are instead referred to by a confusing variety of terms: yuan (rampart), sai (frontier), zhang (barrier), bian zhen or bian qiang (border garrison or border wall).A second modern misconception about the Chinese wall, and about walls in general, is that they mark a hard and fast boundary between nations and cultures, and often between civilization and barbarism. The fondness of the Romans and ancient Chinese for building fixed frontiers tends to encourage the missapprehension that the past was a mass of foreign countries, all with precisely demarcated borders. But the history of Chinese wall-building gives no clear sense of a bricks-and-mortar frontier maintaining Chinese with their culture of rice, silk and poetry within and barbarian with a culture of horse milk, pelts and war northerens without. A third contemporary, and quite natural, misapprehension about the Great Wall is that it is, and has always been, Great. This springs, as much as anything, from a linguistic inaccuracy. Chinese frontier walls definitely gained something in translation: Changcheng, the chinese term (only sporadically used before the twentieth century) that has been rendered into English as Great Wall literally means only Long Wall - not too shabby, admitedly, but lacking in the bombastic overtones of Great. 3.2 The importance today (--> replaces: The Wall and the government in modern China)“This is a great wall and it had to be built by a great people”[New York Times, 25 February 1972, pp. 14, 17], said Richard Nixon and this is probably one of the few quotations about China that is globally accepted. But as simple this sentence is, it shows something about the wall that didn't emerge until the last two centuries. The wall itself to identify the people of China, China as a nation. If we go back to the historical evolution of the wall, we saw that, if we just consider the military or political meaning the wall can be seen as a failure. In his book, Arthur Waldron even says “In the early Ch'ing, the Ming Great Wall was understandably considered (if at all) by most Chinese to be an embodiment of futility and failure...” [The Great Wall of China, Arthur Waldron, p. 168]. So why declares the president of the USA the Great Wall as a symbol for a great people if this people itself sees the same wall as a failure? The Great Wall started to become a symbol for China when people tried to define China as a nation. For centuries China was ruled by an emperor, or a single house [The Great Wall of China, Arthur Waldron, pp. 167, 168] and there was no need to define the nation by other means than the range of the power of the current ruler. But during the last few centuries nations all over the world, if by influence of colonialism or not, started do define themselves with natural boarders [The Great Wall of China, Arthur Waldron, pp. 181] or the legacy of their forefathers. However, while European countries had such natural boarders like the alps, the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea, it was hard to find such criterion in northern China. On the other hand, the mixture of different cultures and peoples that lived all over China and their history of war among each other leads to the absence of a national hero [The Great Wall of China, Arthur Waldron, pp. 179] which could had helped the Chinese people to, at least, define themselves as a Nation. During the same time when Europeans began to develop an interest in the Great Wall at the beginning of the 20th century, it was also the communists around Mao that needed a new symbol for their nation to finish with the old republic.
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