00:00The Great Wall of China is not actually a wall.
00:03I'll tell you some interesting facts about it.
00:06It's not one continuous structure,
00:08but a series of walls and fortifications built over many centuries.
00:13The first mention of a wall being built around the capital city of China
00:16dates back to 770 B.C.,
00:19but most of the wall that we see today was built between 200 B.C. and 1644 A.D.
00:26During the Ming Dynasty, they built the longest continuous wall in one section,
00:31which is about 8,000 miles long.
00:34The purpose of the wall was to keep out the Mongols, but it didn't really work.
00:39The Mongols just rode their horses over it.
00:42In the 19th century, a British explorer named Charles Burton
00:46said that the only way to stop the Chinese from being invaded
00:49was to build a wall so high that the enemy could not climb over it,
00:54so wide that they could not jump over it,
00:57and so thick that they could not blow it up with gunpowder.
01:01And that's how we got the Great Wall of China.
01:04But even he admitted that the wall wasn't much use against determined invaders.
01:09For more interesting facts about...
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