Secrets Of The Great Wall | Ancient China From Above | National Geographic

It's exhausting the wind blows it's so cold this is so steep I don't know how the bricks got up here the

great

wall

of

china

wow it's like being on top of the world endless

wall

endless watchtowers to the horizon It's like nothing you can imagine . It has been studied for decades, but now new technology is revealing its

secrets

like never before. I am Alan Maca, an archaeologist and expert in

ancient

civilizations. I'm going to investigate China's distant past from a completely new perspective. Today, cutting-edge satellites in space see the world in stunning detail and reveal hidden archaeology, allowing us to recreate a lost

ancient

world, invisible to the naked eye.

Working alongside leading Chinese experts, my team and I will travel to some of the most remote and incredible places in the country. landscapes and with cutting-edge science they investigate previously unknown cultures, lost cities and devastating cataclysms. This is ancient China like you've never seen before on the outskirts of China's capital, Beijing. 10 million people a year come to marvel at the

great

wall. This is the greatest man. structure made on the planet, but the only way to really see how vast it is from 500 miles above the earth using satellite images. I'm going to track the Great Wall across towering mountains and remote deserts exploring massive defenses that are just beginning. raining fire and arrows from above meeting archaeologists as they unearth its ancient past oh this is amazing you literally just found these and revealing their long hidden

secrets

seems really cool to find out if this great monument could be even bigger and so much more older than us.

I once thought about it before I began my mission 70 miles north of Beijing, in the rugged Jin Chandling Mountains, on a part of the wall that has remained unchanged for hundreds of years. You see pictures of the great wall and tourism books, but this is something more here in jin chandling satellite data shows how the wall crosses seemingly impossible peaks and every few hundred feet huge stone structures in the ground these towers reveal meticulous engineering look how beautiful this is, really formal arches here lots of space windows everywhere you have a 360 degree view of the landscape.

Is incredible. This is just one of around 25,000 watchtowers built by the Ming dynasty that ruled China from 1368 to 1644. Between the towers, ingenious defenses, I see these strange holes along the wall. open to the outside, what they would have done is take a five pound rock, hollow it out, fill it with gunpowder, put a fuse in there and literally just roll it out of the hole and no more invaders, the Ming did everything they could to combat a deadly enemy from space satellites reveals vast grasslands north of the wall quite wild today in the days of the Ming this was home to tribes of nomadic horsemen the Mongols these fearsome warriors had been attacking and plundering China for centuries the Ming built the great wall to keep them out now, 600 years later, Chinese experts are using science and technology to reveal its secrets.

Everywhere I look I see watchtowers on top of the mountains near a remote section of the wall. This view is incredible. Canadian archaeologist sarah klassen is on the way. To meet one of the teams carrying out this groundbreaking work, Lee Jia and Professor Zhang from Tianjin University are using drone data to create a 3D model of the entire Ming Dynasty wall. It is the most complete scan ever attempted. We have traveled two thousand one hundred kilometers. We still have two thousand five hundred kilometers to travel along the Mingarit wall. It is a huge job without this technology.

Doing something like this wouldn't be possible. Just look at the scenery. You'd have to climb all those cliffs and map all these features. It would take decades if it were possible. New scans reveal the incredible achievements of the Ming in some of China's most extreme terrain - even on completely impassable ridges, they still managed to erect towers. Can you show me what you've done here? You can see that there is a running portion here very close to the cliff. They want to stop all enemies and many parts of the grid wall follow the scope and within the scans new discoveries have been discovered.

Li has detected mysterious openings along the base of the wall. Using your data, I head 120 miles east to investigate, look at this rugged landscape and notice this ridge, see the watchtowers on the ridge, that's where the wall is, so the wall meanders until you reach the saddle ride over here and that's where I want to go. The wall here collapsed, but originally it would have been as tall as a three-story house. Can you imagine a solid wall from this ridge and suddenly there is an open door? in daylight it is completely baffling why would a defensive wall have a gate running through it?

Yes, this is a pretty small compact space right now, but without all this debris here, this would have been the size of a person just walking through here. The crazy thing is that you know this is not a random hole in the wall, this thing is incredibly well built, look at all these bricks, this is a perfect and beautifully made arch, so this was planned and the question is why Lee Joe has found over 50 of these. There are doors along this part of the wall and it is believed that they could be used by scouts sent to spy on the enemy, but the data reveals something else: the jagged edge revealed in this scan is not a deteriorated door but the entrance to a hidden tunnel that was once bricked up before being vandalized looks really cool the doctor the hidden door someone called the secret door this new discovery is completely different from any of the other openings sandpaper has potentially found a way to launch a sudden attack it seems Since this healing gate is originally sealed by normal soldiers, it causes damage inside, then breaks the surface and comes out and the earth should attack, breaking this thin layer of bricks allowed the Ming forces to ambush the enemy before the experts in the Lee Jo's discovery had no idea these hidden tunnels existed.

It is an incredible find. We can't imagine that before you know it, all of this leaves me in awe. The latest technology is revealing that the wall is much more than a simple barrier. It is a complex military system. The big question is how far it extends. Using satellite images we can reconstruct how The Ming Wall extends westward from the mountain ranges across wild grasslands and into the arid desert to its end, where the Ming stopped building here, in the farthest reaches of their empire, an enormous construction much larger than any of the thousands of towers along the way. what it is and what it was used to discover it I'm going to follow the wall to a remote corner of western China I'm investigating the secrets of one of the world's largest ancient icons using satellite data I've tracked the Great Wall from the mountains east of Beijing to the Gobi Desert, a 500,000 square mile expanse in the far northwest of China, right over here I can see sections of the wall, the feat of engineering required to build something so far away here in just This arid, desolate environment simply boggles the mind. mind after hours following the wall something huge emerges from the desert mist a powerful fortress today the modern city of jayaguan is nearby but 600 years ago this fortress would have stood alone in a desolate desert that I never imagined I had never seen anything like this Here in western China, the Great Wall ends in the mountains just a few miles south of here, making this incredible structure the walls' final gateway, the last fortress at the farthest edge of China's vast territory. the Ming dynasty. empire, look how massive it is, rivals any gate or battlement anywhere in the world right now, here you really get a sense of the ambition, engineering and immense power of the ming, a deep moat, walls up to 36 feet high and observe The towers in each corner form three layers of defense and even if the enemy manages to enter, there are traps designed to create devastating death zones.

You walk into this courtyard and if you're an invading army, they can close those gates, close those iron gates there. and you are trapped here and suddenly it will start raining shooting arrows from above and your invading force is doomed. This is an ingenious military strategy, all set and fixed in the design of this incredible fortress. It is huge but also meticulously built. The precision of the construction here is amazing and you know the emperor demanded it and there is a legend that the architect told the emperor that I can tell you the exact number of bricks that will be needed to build this fortress.

He said it will be 99,999. and incredibly at the end of the construction there was only one brick left and that brick is placed there on that small ledge as a kind of mini monument to the incredible precision design of this fortress, its position right at the end of the large Ming Dynasty wall. It earned the name of the first and largest pass under the sky, but this fortress is only a small part of a mega structure like no other on Earth, just one end of its great wall of China, until we had images from space, experts They didn't know how massive.

The Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty really was, but now Chinese experts have calculated that it is five and a half thousand miles long—more than 1,500 miles longer than previously thought and long enough to stretch from New York to Los Angeles and back, but new technology is Also uncovering secrets that take us beyond the great Ming empire, 1,200 miles away, Sarah has established a base camp in the shadow of the great wall. We know that Jiuguan Fortress marks the end of the Ming wall, but satellite data reveals something else. Oh wow, the Chinese experts have told Sarah about another section even further into the desert.

If I zoom in on the satellite images I can see that this part of the wall is much more eroded than other parts of the wall so it might suggest that it is older than the parts of the wall built during the Ming dynasty this wall extends much further past the Ming fortress and continues west for hundreds of miles the wall is completely straight in the middle of this desert there is absolutely nothing else around here I can't imagine why they would need to build a wall here so what is going on? I head west in search of answers.

I want to know how old this wall is, where it goes, and if the Ming didn't build it, who did? I now have over 230 miles. west of jiuguan fortress here in the kumtag desert it is one of the harshest environments i have ever been in you know very little grows here the temperatures are literally below zero it is an incredible place to imagine finding archeology sarah guides me to Faint traces of what looks like an even older wall you saw in the satellite data. If I get here I think I can get a first look. Wow, this is cool and it's not exactly what I expected and it seems kind of primitive.

I want to see more line get closer here in the middle of nowhere a stretch of old wall and it looks very different from anything I've seen so far this is a very distinctive type of material we have packed earth packed with a reed base these are reeds This is actually a type of thick grass pressed there to serve as a base to keep the wall stable. This frame is an ingenious way to build even with the loose sand and gravel of the desert, but if the Ming didn't build this, then who did it? discovered? I will meet with Zhang Joon Min, the head of a team from the Gansu Institute of Relics and Archeology who are searching for answers.

Wow, this is great, tell me what you have here. These are two arrowheads that we found close to each other. It is bronze and one is iron, you can see it is still sharp. I have never seen this arrowhead shape before you know where it is. It's basically three sides like this and it's that common. I found many of these along the wall in this The area of ​​these arrowheads is very typical of the Han dynasty fifteen hundred years before the Ming, before the Roman empire was formed in the West and Cleopatra ruled ancient Egypt . The Han dynasty came to power.

They oversaw a golden age of artistic culture and economic prosperity. They are so well preserved I am amazed look at that edge it is simply incredible the shape is so clear and beautiful these little arrowheads reveal something momentous that the wall here is over 2000 years old it is an even earlier great wall of

china

that once stretched along Long more than 6,000 miles, much of the famous Ming Dynasty wall was simply built on top 1,500 years later, buffeted by desert winds for more than two millennia, what remains of this ancient stretch of great wall are only fragments of what was once a powerful barrier.

It was difficult to just look at these ruined sections of the wall tohave an idea of ​​what it originally looked like, so using historical sources and archaeological evidence we've made this pretty phenomenal digital reconstruction of what the wall might have looked like. It's just amazing when the wall was first built it would have been up to 20 feet tall this thing was huge I can only imagine being part of an invading nomadic army and finding myself up against this wall and thinking maybe it's better to just go home because This was formidable. Then, another discovery recently unearthed in the desert sands that suggests the wall was about more than just defending Chinese territory.

We found this coin nearby. It's a wooju coin. Oh, this is amazing. You literally just found them. Yes, they may have left them here. by traders these merchants may have been traveling along a series of ancient trade routes known as the silk road established by the han the silk road stretched from china through central asia and india to modern day Turkey, Egypt, Arabia and Rome brought enormous wealth to China. and it had to be defended at all costsSo the great wall not only served to protect the empire, it also served to protect China's gateway to this vital artery of global trade, but there is something more intriguing here next to the wall, remains oldest rising from the desert, a mysterious eroded structure.

My technical team, Ryan Castner. and eric lowe will join me and work with experts from peking university. Let's check it out. I'm on a quest to uncover the secrets of the great wall of china and my tech team is working with researchers ma li wu yunnan and maching long. from Peking University to investigate what appears to be a mysterious tower built near an ancient section of the wall, so they're flying the drone. Now first we are going to make a kind of lawnmower pattern on the top to get an aerial view of the there, the drone takes hundreds of images of the structure that will be combined to create a detailed three-dimensional model, after which the team will scan a four-mile section of the wall for traces of more debris using a drone to fly. it saves us a lot of time, the drone can go much faster than on foot, hours of flight and 1500 individual photographs later Hello guys, come in and I have come to check the results with the archaeologists and the leading Han wall expert, yang jun.

Who will help us interpret our findings? Alright guys, then show me what you did. To give you a little context, you can see the wall from the satellite image very clearly if you look, it's a nice linear feature here, but switching to the 3D elevation model reveals details that aren't visible in the satellite images, so if we look and actually in this spot here, right where it bends, there appears to be a clear bulge that doesn't appear to be natural, you can see it in the elevation. model, the redder it is, the higher it is, there is a mound five or six meters high, it seems to make a lot of sense to us that that is another tower because it turns at an angle and cuts south exactly exactly so that it would be a place natural where you'll want to look to see all the sides where everything was.

The height of the structure and the strategic position suggest that it may have been a watchtower. Then Ryan sees something totally unexpected. You can see a clear structure. Another tower that was behind. The wall is basically on top of a hill. This is really interesting. Did they build towers outside the wall? Based on our research, we found that most of the towers were along the wall, but there are some that are outside. It's strange. Some of these towers are deep inside the enemy. territory miles beyond the wall, were they actually simple watchtowers or could there be something more here? 600 miles away, in a vault at the Gansu Jianju Museum, there are ancient relics that could hold the answer, oh, research director Sao Song Li has agreed to show our historian. dr ciao hue chenille these amazing finds are strips of wood they are about the length of a ruler the wood looks well preserved you have these written in ink very fine writing buried in the desert for two thousand years these strips were unearthed in what was once the office of a military commander and contain instructions for soldiers stationed in the towers.

Okay, they are very difficult to understand. First of all, at the top there is a dot that tells you that it is the beginning of the rules and then. The first two characters are shongnu, which means that the Huns were feared nomadic horsemen who roamed the northern grasslands a thousand years before the Mongols, so the rule here is to talk about what you should do when the Huns come to town. border so the next characters let's say you have to raise a flag on the rajon pole raise this flag a marker known as a pung could only have a purpose to mark other towers and there are even rules about what to do at night when the flags cannot be see during the night.

Shoot at the top of a tower and do not turn it off until morning. All the towers that see this light must also be turned on and travel along the entire defense line until you reach the command where the soldiers are told and the sheets even contain instructions. As for how to signal how many enemies were attacking, let's say you have over a thousand Huns and that's what they've quoted, there's a very specific signal they need to send so that, without words, the commander knows that a thousand vehicles are coming. To us, this tells us that the towers we have mapped in the desert, including those deep in enemy territory, are not simple guard towers, they are beacon towers that are part of a complex early warning system.

Using our drone data, we can now reconstruct a full 3D model of what they may have looked like. Built more than two years ago, they were made of coated rammed earth and plaster and stood up to 26 feet tall with platforms on top where They lit the fires and thanks to the incredible knowledge revealed on the wooden tablets, we now know that These towers formed a sophisticated communication system designed to provide early warning of an attack and pass it along for hundreds of miles along the wall. . What the Han created is remarkable, but were they the first to build a defensive wall to protect their empire and trace the wall?

To its roots I need to travel even further back in time, to the reign of a tyrant of incomparable power and ambition, the man who conceived another of the greatest icons of ancient China, the terracotta warriors. I am in the city of Shan after having traveled for thousands of miles in the far northwest deserts this was once the ancient capital of China. I want to trace the origins of the great wall, but to do so I need to go back in time to the formation of China and explore the history of China. First Emperor I'm starting with his most famous creation the Terracotta Warriors.

I've been reading about this for years and years, but this is my first time here and I'm not telling you anything. Nothing prepares you for this experience. This is literally one. of the greatest achievements of all ancient civilization anywhere in the world, more than six thousand figures row after row of soldiers and commanders, an entire army immortalized in clay and all built for the first emperor of china, chin shiwang di, from where I am standing, there are no two figures that are the same the uniforms are different their facial expressions are different even the mustaches this speaks to me of the power that the emperor was able to invoke during his life as ruler this is extraordinary from space we can see that the huge The hangar that houses the terracotta army is just a small part of their enormous mausoleum complex and at its center is hidden within this strange looking hill the emperor's tomb.

It has never been opened. Archaeologists still don't know how to excavate it without destroying its contents. but I will meet with dr. zhang wei shing, who has been using seismic scanning technology to glimpse what's beneath, what do you know about what's there? We knew that there is a huge battery chamber beneath the earth, it measures 160 by 140 meters in size, 30 meters and inside that there is a huge nine-level platform, ancient texts say that the tomb contains a replica of the cosmos with pearls like stars. , rivers of liquid mercury and even deadly booby traps, sounds far-fetched, but Professor Zhang has found evidence to suggest there may be some truth to The Legends We detect very high levels of mercury in the air, so we know there is mercury inside of the enormous burial chamber.

The sacred fumes of these finds suggest that there is truth in the ancient texts and that means that there may also be truth in what they record from another of the The emperor's construction projects a huge defensive wall, the first great wall of China, although today little left. Records show it stretched for almost 2,000 miles across northern China. They also reveal the human cost of the emperor's ambition. He forced 300,000 soldiers and half a million workers. work on its construction and for many it was the death sentence, they died of hunger or fatigue or in some cases were flogged to death, but it cemented the Chinchiwandi emperor's place in all of world history after an incredible journey that spanned thousands of miles and reached distant places. in the past I am nearing the end of my search but an intriguing mystery remains: did the first emperor really come up with the idea of ​​a great wall out of nowhere to find the answer?

I need to go back even further, to a time before their bloody rise to power and before the formation of China, I want to investigate one last mystery surrounding the Great Wall of China: how did the first emperor come up with the idea of ​​building a defensive wall colossal? That question has taken me 300 miles north of xi. 'an to the luis plateau i'm following satellite images to mysterious lines of rocks and steep earth banks the remains of a primitive and clearly ancient wall there are pieces of pottery scattered all over here clues to who built it, i mean, this piece It's just a commoner like a kitchen jar and the designs on the outside tell me this is very early, we're talking about the pre-Chin empire 2200 years ago, at a time before the first emperor came to power, China was divided in seven states at war to protect their territories each state built their own defensive walls incredibly these are the remains of a wall built before the formation of China this is pretty cool in 221 BC.

C. The king of one of the warring states Qin Shiwang Di is waging a bloody war and crushes all the other states unites China and declares himself the first emperor with his new power combines the existing walls of the warring state and builds new ones sections to create a massive defensive shield over 3,000 miles long the first true great wall of china its incredible construction would be expanded and developed by the han dynasty and over a thousand years later the ming dynasty would take things even further creating the monument we see today the great wall was not a single thing it was a mesh of many walls spanning enormous periods of time i mean truly china is defined by its walls my research has taken us across china to the edge of the empire .

I have traced the Great Wall back to its roots over 2,200 years ago and revealed how it is not just one wall, but many, that evolved over the centuries into an astonishing military masterpiece that we always knew was great, But now, using the latest satellite imagery and cutting-edge technology, Chinese archaeologists are revealing that this global icon is even larger than we ever imagined: measuring more than twice as long as previously thought and spanning 13,000 miles long. enough to cover half the earth on this trip. I have learned that the great wall was as alive and dynamic as the generations of people who built it.

It is the result of struggle and achievements for more than 2000 years. It is not just an enduring symbol. of ancient china is the history of china itself