Today’s entry from Life magazine on global haunted places is about China’s Great Wall.
The “wall” stretches more than 5,500 miles from near North Korea to the Gobi desert, built more than 2,200 years ago to protect from invasions by northern nomads. “Not a wall so much as a series of fortifications erratically erected by discrete states, changcheng (“long wall”) was completed during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when it became the world’s largest man-made object,” the entry says.
The haunting has to do with the nearly 400,000 lives lost in pursuit of the Great Wall’s construction from overly onerous labor by hand, with even boys being employed at one point for the project. The rumor is that women feared giving birth to boys because of their use in child labor for the wall. Visitors today speak of feeling imbalanced or sick, and others have seen the ghosts of prematurely deceased laborers on the wall.
Two thoughts occur. The first is that the Trump administration has promoted the idea of a wall to keep things out of the U.S. southern border. Some say this amounts to racism, but the wall was already there; I think Trump is really just talking about improving it. The magazine entry suggests the wall was porous in China too. The second is a pop music reference. As a teenager, I really liked Pink Floyd’s The Wall; I think the basic point of the album and movie was that personal psychology has a lot to do with international warfare. People like me have taken it too seriously in our youths, but I think the band had a point.