Great Wall of China Great Wall of China The Great Wall of China is a series of fortifications made of stone, brick, tamped earth, wood, and other materials, generally built along an east-to-west line across the historical northern borders of China to protect the Chinese states and empires against the raids and invasions of the various nomadic groups of the Eurasian Steppe with an eye to expansion. Several walls were being built as early as the 7th century BC; these, later joined together and made bigger and stronger, are collectively referred to as the Great Wall. Especially famous is the wall built in 220–206
History of the Great Wall of China elaborate but atypical stretches of the Great Wall and generalized such fortifications across the whole northern frontier. Furthermore, Martini erroneously identified the Ming Wall as the same wall built by Qin Shi Huang in the 3rd century BC, thereby exaggerating both the Wall's antiquity and its size. This misconception was compounded by the "China Illustrata" of Father Athanasius Kircher (160280), which provided pictures of the Great Wall as imagined by a European illustrator. All these and other accounts from missionaries in China contributed to the Orientalism of the eighteenth century, in which a mythical China and its exaggerated Great Wall