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With the Mongols expelled, the new rulers, the Ming emperors, were determined that an invasion would never happen again. And so in 1368, when Europe was being decimated by the Black Plague(黑死病, 鼠疫), the Ming rulers created the world's largest and greatest civil engineering project, even greater than earlier walls, because this wall was mostly built of stone. The Ming Wall stretches from Shanhaiguan(山海关) on the Yellow Sea to Jiayuguan(嘉峪关) in the Gobi Desert. It lies across China like a long winding spine, 4,000 miles in length, with thousands of watchtowers poking out like vertebrae.
Much of the Great Wall was made of stone, a building material 100 times more labor-intensive than mud brick. The wall builders were not in the least daunted by spiked mountain peaks. And even among these misty mountain tops, the wall had to be zealously guarded. Watchtowers were crucial to the protection of the wall. If reinforcements were needed, the guards signaled to the village of mere a half mile away. Here, the old garrison walls of a long abandoned barracks still stand. Some 500 troops would have been stationed here, and if this wasn't enough, there were even larger concentration of troops in forts, a few minutes' signaling away. In this way, a small number of men on the wall could alert an army of over one million men in a matter of a few hours.
Army garrisons competed with each other in wall building. Each general wanted his section to be more impressive than all the others. A plaque proclaims that in the spring of the year 1597, Tongkai was commander in charge of the gang building this section of the wall. Chen Yiting was in charge of food and even the lowly stonemason Wu Zengye had his name carved.
To build a wall to this standard was not easy, much of the labor was carried out by convicts, who if they died, had to be replaced by another member of their family, and so on until the sentence was completed, hardly a method that encouraged happy workers. Every 50 feet, the builders installed drains to carry off rain water. These waterspouts were always built on the inside of the wall, the side away from the enemy. So we couldn't lasso a spout in climb of the wall.
decimate: destroy or kill a large part of (a group); inflict great destruction or damage on
winding: twisting or turning; sinuous
in the least: also, in the slightest. At all, in the smallest degree. These terms are nearly always used in a negative context.
stonemason: a craftsman who works with stone or brick
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