"But here’s the t***h about China’s epic wall: It was a failure.

The Great Wall “didn’t do what it was supposed to do, it was enormously costly, and there’s no question that it caused great suffering among the people who built it,” says Arthur Waldron, an expert in Chinese military and diplomatic history at the University of Pennsylvania who has written a book called The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth.

It’s also not really a wall—at least not a continuous 13,000-mile wall. “It was nothing at all like we have in our imaginations,” Waldron told me. “I think that our friend Trump is dealing with the myth and not the reality.”

President Richard Nixon surveyed the wall in 1972: “This is a great wall.” AP

While there’s no doubt that the Great Wall was one of history’s most magnificent military installations, both its “greatness” and its “wallness” are exaggerated. It is really a series of fortifications and watchtowers (joined up around 220 B.C. and expanded upon over thousands of years under various leaders)—not an unbroken barrier."


"As the Washington Post‘s Ishaan Tharoor wrote in response to Trump’s comments, the Great Wall’s significance is best understood “not as a security barrier, but as a work of political propaganda.”"