Great Wall

MatC · 299859. Fri Mar 21, 2008 8:26 am

I know we’ve done the Great Wall before, but this review of a new book has a couple of details I don’t think I’d heard before:

Q: How old is the Great Wall?
A: The bit everyone visits, and you're always seeing on TV, is only 500 years old - and most of that was restored in the 20th century.

There is no such thing as the Great Wall of China. There are lots of big walls in China, built in different eras, in different regions, for different purposes, from different materials. The earliest was built around 350BC, the latest in the 17th century. Most are made of earth, not stone. It was foreigner visitors, right at the end of the 18th century, who first started going on about there being a single Great Wall.

S: review of The Great Wall by John Man (Bantam, 2008), in Sunday Telegraph 16 March 08.

Awitt · 920833. Sun Jul 01, 2012 6:59 am

If your description above's from the book, then there's a glaring grammar typo, being 'foreigner visitors.'
Should be 'foreign visitors.'