The Walls of Nanjing

 Over the years, the Chinese have developed a reputation for building walls.  But until our visit, I was not aware that Nanjing boasts one of the most impressive city walls in the world.  The wall as it stands today was built in the fourteenth century by the first emperors of the Ming dynasty.  Shortly after establishing Nanjing as their national capitol, the Ming began to expand and enlarge the old city wall.  When they were finished, the walls of Nanjing measured 22 miles around - the longest city wall in the world (if you can trust the Nanjing tourism bureau).  

 Over the years, parts of the wall have come down.  Some parts were destroyed for urban expansion.  Some parts were destroyed when the city was besieged and captured during the Second World War.  But more than half of the original 22 miles is still standing.  As you can see in the first two photos, the wall stands about 50 feet tall.  The photo below is taken at the top, where the wall is about 30 feet wide.

 The city of Nanjing had 13 city gates.  The largest and most famous of them still remains.  It is called Zhong Hua Men.  (Men, if you remember, is the Chinese word for gate or doorway.)  Today it is a tourist spot for visitors from inside and outside of China.  To enter at Zhong Hua Men, you had to pass through 4 doors and cross three enclosed courtyards.  This design was to insure that any army which penetrated the first door would be trapped and destroyed in the enclosures.  The photo below shows the enclosures and the full length of Zhong Hua Men.

At the first doorway, the outer wall was beefed up to form a castle.  The wall at this point is 100 feet thick (I'm estimating)  and has arched chambers built into it to house troops and supplies and implements of destruction.  Back in the day, there would have been a wooden gatehouse rising another two or three stories above all that. 

The wall and it's gates are constructed of stone and bricks.  The bricks were produced in locations across all of China, at the command of the emperor.  As an early form of quality assurance, each of the bricks was required to be inscribed with name of the maker and other key information.  It brick crumbled, then the maker was punished harshly.  It appears that this proved to be pretty effective motivation for the brick makers.  You can still see the inscriptions on the bricks in the wall, as shown below.

 On either side of the gatehouse was a long ramp for horses or oxen to carry supplies to the top.  Today these ramps are decorated with lacquered statues of Ming warriors.  The photo below shows one of these ramps.

 The final photo requires a little bit of legend as part of the explanation.   The original name of this gate was Ju Bao Men, or the Gate of Gathered Treasure.   The legend says that, in the beginning, every attempt to build the wall at this spot ended in failure.  The foundations would sink under the weight of stone and the walls would collapse.  Finally, the Ming emperor came to the site to inspect and was greeted by the king of the frogs.  The frog king complained that the wall and the city residents were causing great suffering for his kingdom and irritating him to no end.  So the Ming emperor wend to the city market, bought every frog, and set it free. Then he buried a pot of treasure under the foundations as an offering to the frog king. 

One of the storage chambers at the top of the gate has been decorated as a shrine to the frog king.  The walls are decorated with posters telling the story also a number of carved jade frogs to which people leave offerings of small coins.  The photo shows a representation of the pot of buried treasure.  On the base, surrounding the pot, are little frog statues.