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 identify the Great Wall in China with the walls of the Alexander romances. Soon after Europeans reached Ming China in the early 16th century, accounts of the Great Wall started to circulate in Europe, even though no European would see it with their own eyes for another century. The work "A Treatise of China and the Adjoyning Regions" by Gaspar da Cruz (c. 152070) offered an early discussion of the Great Wall in which he noted, "a Wall of an hundred leagues in length. And some will affirme to bee more than a hundred leagues." Another early account written by