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00:02The Great Wall of China.
00:05The longest, most expensive fortification ever built.
00:09No matter what height you climb, how good your eyes are,
00:12no matter how good your binoculars are, you can't see it all.
00:15It really is a geographical wonder.
00:19It's recognized all over the world,
00:22but its construction is still shrouded in mystery.
00:28Every time I come to a place like this on the Great Wall,
00:31where it stretches for miles and miles,
00:33I'm just blown away every single time.
00:37What did it take to build it?
00:40Who was it built to keep out?
00:43Although they were few in number,
00:45they were the most feared warriors in the world.
00:47The only way to find out is to blow this wall apart,
00:53dismantling its defenses,
00:56and pulling apart its towers brick by brick,
01:00will help us unearth the astonishing engineering secrets
01:03at the heart of this ancient wonder.
01:12The Great Wall of China.
01:15A vast fortification that in total stretches over 13,000 miles across a continent.
01:24This immense megastructure was a defensive shield for the world's most populous nation.
01:31It stretches from snow-covered deserts all the way to the Yellow Sea,
01:37and was the largest construction project the world had ever seen.
01:46This wall is the greatest man-made structure on our planet.
01:50Over a billion tough clay bricks helped it survive for centuries.
01:55The wall rises about 23 feet high,
01:58with tall battlements to shield defenders,
02:02and built-in arrow loops for shooting at invaders.
02:07This monumental brick structure is thousands of miles long,
02:11and stretches over 16 feet wide,
02:16with tens of thousands of watchtowers standing guard.
02:26For centuries, it was China's first line of defense.
02:29But the construction of this iconic brick wall
02:31wasn't the first time that China's emperors
02:33had built a barricade across the country.
02:40Their predecessors erected primitive earth walls
02:43over 1,500 years before the famous brick wall was even started.
02:49The big mystery?
02:51What drove China's rulers to build such mammoth structures?
02:56Quite beautiful mountains these,
02:58and making the scenery more magnificent is the wall right here.
03:03This was the ancient frontier.
03:06William Lindsay is one of the world's foremost Great Wall experts.
03:11He has walked the wall's length to investigate its many secrets.
03:17The thousands of Great Wall miles under William's belt
03:21have given him a unique understanding of its history.
03:25This way is China.
03:26This way is Mongolia, the nomadic lands.
03:29The Chinese had a good deal.
03:31They could farm, they could produce a lot of food,
03:34more than they needed.
03:35People in the north, bad deal.
03:38It's impossible to farm there.
03:39The growing season is too short.
03:44The nomads lived to the north of China and moved their herds with the seasons.
03:49They raided China on horseback to get a hold of the goods and foods they couldn't produce themselves.
03:56The droughts or a terrible winter could destroy everything the people had.
04:01And then they had a survival challenge.
04:05Where to go for relief.
04:08They didn't go north to Siberia.
04:10They naturally came south and trespassed on Chinese land.
04:17The nomads were naturally a crack army.
04:21From childhood, they're riding horses, even without saddles and stirrups.
04:27This kind of schooling made the nomads the most feared army in the world.
04:36To make things worse for the Chinese, the nomads weren't just excellent horsemen.
04:41They armed themselves with an incredibly sophisticated weapon.
04:46The composite bow.
04:51Young Fushi is one of the world's best bow makers.
04:58For ten generations, his family has practiced this ancient noble art,
05:03which was the key to making the nomad horde so devastating.
05:10Master Young's task is to create a bow that stores enough energy to kill a man.
05:17His first step is to carve out and glue together the bow's wooden core.
05:23But wood on its own doesn't have the flex and strength to propel an arrow to a lethal speed.
05:37The secret that stops the wooden bow from snapping is its clever construction.
05:43Master Young glues a layer of tough buffalo horn onto the bow to make the wooden core stronger.
06:02To give the bow a bigger punch, he glues tendons from a bull's neck onto the other side.
06:12The bow's sword is built.
06:14The sword is built in a 4-5 p.m.
06:16The sword is built in a wall of 4-5 p.m.
06:16The sword is built around 110 to 130 meters.
06:20The sword is built in a lower weight and strong.
06:25It can be built in a lower weight and strong.
06:30Upon release, the arrow flies away at an astounding 186 miles per hour.
06:37power.
06:40How could the Chinese defend thousands of miles of territory against these vicious nomad
06:46attacks?
07:00In order to protect the ancient Chinese from invading Mongolians, an elaborate barrier
07:06thousands of miles long was constructed.
07:14Beneath the brick we see today lie the remains of an earlier earthen wall.
07:21Layers of compacted soil created a rock-hard barricade.
07:31Thin reed mats separated the layers for stability and drainage.
07:37These multi-layered earth walls rose up nearly 20 feet tall.
07:53Satellite imagery reveals that these first walls stretched from the Yellow Sea all the
07:58way to the desert of Western China.
08:03But how did the Chinese build a wall like this in a barren desert, with no obvious building
08:09materials around?
08:11Every time I come to a place like this on the Great Wall, where it stretches for miles and
08:15miles, I'm just blown away every single time.
08:19Great Wall explorer Richard Fairbrother is in China's Western Desert.
08:24He's searching for secrets of the earliest Great Wall, which wasn't made of bricks, but
08:29out of soil.
08:31It's amazing to think about the number of people involved and the amount of labor it took to
08:36build something like this.
08:38To investigate how the walls have stood up to these harsh desert winds, Richard is going
08:46to reconstruct part of the wall.
08:51Builder Mr. Young and his team are using original methods for this project.
08:57The finished structure is known as a rammed earth wall.
09:02You build these walls by layers of soil, and then layers of these reeds, and you put them
09:09on top there and then spread them around.
09:13One other advantage of these reeds is that they provide the drainage mechanism for the
09:18wall.
09:19So the rain comes down through the soil and then is passed out by the structure of these
09:25reeds.
09:28Even with reeds for drainage, violent storms and scouring winds eventually wear everything
09:33to dust in this unforgiving landscape.
09:37So how are parts of the wall, over 2,000 years old, still standing?
09:44Lab tests reveal that the desert soil known as LESS has a special property thanks in part
09:49to the crushed shells of long dead snails.
09:53LESS is rich in calcium carbonate and when that's exposed to water, it gives the wall or
09:58the soil a self-cementing characteristic.
10:01The ancient builders unknowingly made use of this clever chemistry to build a wall that stood
10:07for millennia.
10:09The purpose of the ramming is to compress the LESS together and give it that tremendous strength
10:18that these rammed earth walls are known for.
10:22If you had to do it all day long in the blazing desert sun, I think you'd be pretty knackered
10:29by the end.
10:34A team of 80 men could build over a half mile of wall in just seven days.
10:42It towered almost 20 feet tall and kept enemies out of China for centuries.
10:48And the only way through was to climb the wall under a hail of lethal arrows.
10:53By the 16th century, things had changed.
10:57China's enemies had more ferocious weapons and the old walls were lacking.
11:10They already had a lot of wall, so what was the next option?
11:13More wall?
11:14Better wall?
11:16That was the question to be answered.
11:21The only option was to undergo the most ambitious construction project the world had ever seen.
11:34The original Great Wall of China was built from mud over 2,000 years ago and constructed
11:42to defend the Chinese empire against nomad attack.
11:46But over the centuries, as warfare developed, this earth wall became a less fearsome obstacle.
11:54Military advances forced the Chinese to strengthen their line of defense.
12:03Historian William Lindsay is walking the Great Wall at Jianco in the mountains north of Beijing.
12:11He's trying to understand what prompted the Chinese to upgrade this vast defensive barrier.
12:16Just 50 miles over there is Beijing.
12:21That was not a very safe position.
12:27In 1550, the Mongols stormed through the wall.
12:33And the vulnerability of Beijing's position came into perspective.
12:43The Mongolian nomads surged through these mountains to the land surrounding the Chinese capital, Beijing.
12:50They devastated the civilian population, and the Chinese ruling dynasty faced a huge dilemma.
12:56The court and the corridors of power were absolutely shaking in fear.
13:02The question was, how could the Great Wall of China fail?
13:07The time had come for a new and improved wall.
13:12The Chinese built a vast structure using billions of tons of solid stone and bricks.
13:20It sat on a sturdy foundation of huge granite blocks.
13:27Smooth bricks made the sheer walls almost impossible to scale.
13:34And battlements protected the defenders at the top.
13:39Rubble was crammed between the brick faces to create a stable cord.
13:45And smooth stones paved the top.
13:49Nearly 23 feet high and over 16 feet thick, this wall was impenetrable.
13:57So how did the builders produce enough bricks to build a wall across China?
14:03Colin Richards has the answer.
14:06He has spent his career conserving brick buildings.
14:12Today he joins an extraordinary $15 million project to restore this magnificent structure.
14:20Alongside an eight-man restoration crew,
14:22he's using original construction techniques to investigate just how difficult it was to build the Great Wall.
14:36Any excess, throw it into the mould.
14:39Now we just need to make sure it gets to the corners.
14:42If we can get this off easy, then we've got a good brick.
14:47The secret to building a wall quickly is to use big bricks made of clay.
14:53The bricks on the Great Wall are four times larger than the bricks we use today to build houses.
15:00The bigger you can create them, although they're very heavy to move, then the quicker you can build the wall,
15:07because it's simply stacking one on top of each other.
15:11I'm happy with that.
15:12I'm happy with that.
15:13We can just smooth out the side.
15:16That can dry out.
15:19Let's go in the kiln, and we'll have another brick for the Great Wall of China.
15:26The team leaves the bricks to dry.
15:29Now they need firing.
15:32We're putting the last few bricks onto the top of the kiln,
15:36and we've left spaces between them so that the heat can come up to the top of the kiln,
15:41stay there before it makes its journey back down again and out through the chimneys.
15:45And we'll put a big layer of earth on the top, which will insulate, keep the heat in for as
15:51long as we can.
15:53It takes Colin and the team a morning of hard physical labor just to load the kiln.
15:58Firing will fuse the clay particles in the bricks to make them extremely tough.
16:05When the wall was first built, thousands of kilns lit up this landscape.
16:11To produce perfectly fired bricks, Colin and the team rely on their years of experience
16:16to carefully control the kiln's temperature.
16:19We have to keep an eye on the colors that the bricks are changing to.
16:24We go through a sort of red hot, a yellow hot, a white hot.
16:29And once we're on the white hot, we have to hold it at that for 12 hours to ensure that
16:34temperature,
16:35which is around 1,000 degrees, spreads through the stack of bricks and then stop the fire in.
16:44The brick kiln works through an ingenious design.
16:47The fire isn't under the bricks, but beside them in a tunnel that draws in fresh air.
16:55The kiln's shape forces hot air down through the bricks and out of the three chimneys,
17:00so the bricks fire evenly.
17:1124 hours after the successful firing, the crew must haul these newly fired bricks up to the wall.
17:20So how did the wall's original builders move billions of bricks from the kilns to the top of high mountain
17:26peaks?
17:30The transportation of these sort of heavy objects from one place to another, you know, is very arduous.
17:40Just like their ancient counterparts, Colin and the team have only one option to get the work done.
17:46Manpower.
17:47We need all the labor we can get because the more people you've got, then the easier the tasks become.
17:56More than one million men were put to work building the wall, constantly firing, transporting, and laying new bricks.
18:20Today, investigators like William are trying to solve another of the Great Wall's enduring mysteries.
18:28How did the architects determine the best path against invaders?
18:34Whenever visitors reach the wall, they always tend to ask the same questions,
18:38and one of those questions is, why is the wall here and not over there or over here?
18:45William studies the landscape around the Great Wall to understand why the Chinese built where they did.
18:52From the top of this watchtower, I can see precisely why the wall is here.
18:58Down here, low ground, ascending, ascending, and this is the peak.
19:03And the wall is taking that peak line up to the peak over there.
19:08I move to the right and the wall descends.
19:12Level of the mountains falls away dramatically.
19:15This is the absolutely perfect line for this section of wall.
19:21The wall's builders followed the high ground.
19:24But their path was never a simple straight line.
19:28Initially, I couldn't see any logic in that seemingly haphazard route that the wall took.
19:35But actually, all of these twists and turns, I believe, are for a purpose.
19:41It improved their opportunities in terms of lines of fire.
19:45Not only in the faces of the enemy, but from the side.
19:50No enemy in their right mind would want to fight with the Chinese right here.
20:01The Chinese built the Great Wall to follow the terrain, rising 4,921 feet to the tops of mountains.
20:15They positioned watchtowers 492 feet apart to maximize their kill zones.
20:23And cleared the trees for two miles, so raiders were in clear view.
20:29Spurs extended the line of sight to guard against attacks.
20:39The wall was a huge physical barrier.
20:43But without soldiers, it wasn't stopping anybody.
20:48Had the Chinese just built a wall in the hope that that would keep the nomads on their horses out,
20:54that would have been completely useless.
20:57The wall had to be permanently garrisoned, actively manned.
21:05Just how many warriors would it take to patrol this massive wall?
21:10And where were they all going to live?
21:20The Chinese constructed huge sections of the 16th century Great Wall from bricks and mortar.
21:28It presented a formidable barrier to China's enemies.
21:33But with no army to repel these attackers, the wall alone was not enough.
21:40The performance of the wall depended on who was manning it, how many men there were.
21:47William Lindsay is at Jin Shanling, north of Beijing,
21:51to investigate how the Chinese manned this wall with a million soldiers.
21:55I believe this is the prototype section for the redesign of the wall.
22:01Nowhere else do you find the towers so close together.
22:07The Chinese built the brick wall with these towers just 492 feet apart.
22:13Towers like these probably accommodated 20 to 30 men.
22:17I found figures early 1600s of 120 per kilometer.
22:25Pretty intense garrisoning levels.
22:29Living hundreds of miles from civilization,
22:32how did these soldiers survive in near isolation?
22:36The answer lies inside the wall.
22:41Tens of thousands of towers housed the troops.
22:49Each tower's first floor slept up to 30 soldiers on stone beds,
22:55while coal fires kept the rooms warm during freezing winters.
23:00Walls 36 feet high and over 3 feet thick protected the soldiers,
23:05and windows allowed for a constant lookout.
23:09On the upper level, a weapons store kept the soldiers armed when they faced an attack.
23:15These towers garrisoned the armies that stood guard on the wall all year round.
23:27The Great Wall and its thousands of towers contain more bricks than any other building on the planet.
23:36Restoration expert Colin Richards is helping a crew rebuild a derelict section of wall.
23:42The crew has made new bricks.
23:45Now they must fix them together with mortar.
23:47This mortar can be incredibly hard,
23:50and in some instances harder than the bricks themselves.
23:54And I've got a picture here which shows the mortar standing proud of the bricks.
23:58In sections, the Great Wall's bricks have eroded away,
24:02leaving a lattice of the stronger mortar behind.
24:05They've eroded beyond the face of the wall,
24:08and it just demonstrates what an incredible material this is.
24:13The mix of the mortar remains a mystery.
24:16There's no written record of the original recipe.
24:20But Colin's heard from the local farmers that the key to its strength lay in a surprising ingredient.
24:26Rice.
24:28To investigate, Colin uses a crude technique to analyze the mortar's contents.
24:36If you take a lump of the original mortar and break it down as finely as you can, and then
24:42add it to water, agitate the mix, then you should get various settlement of different layers.
24:49And that will allow you to identify what the mix was constructed of.
24:55He leaves the crushed mortar to settle for three hours, and then checks it.
25:01What is surprising is that we can see that there is quite a lot of aggregate in the mortar.
25:07You know, there's sand, there's sort of crushed stone, there's silt.
25:12So, you know, there was a lot of sort of binding material in the mortar, and that is really interesting
25:19because it's a very strong mix.
25:21The aggregate in the mix makes the mortar pack together tightly.
25:25But Colin trusts what locals said about the sticky rice water.
25:32In this part of China, rice was in abundance, and they found that if they added it to the mortar,
25:37not only would it set more quickly, but it was far more durable.
25:42Colin is making a batch of sticky rice mortar for his own bricks.
25:47We need to boil this water and get it sort of bubbling quite quickly, and then add our rice to
25:53it.
25:55Scientists believe that the starch in the rice gave the mortar its extra strength.
26:01Colin mixes his fresh mortar using lime, sand, and his specially prepared sticky rice water.
26:09What we have to do is try to lay a bed of mortar so the mortar spreads to the edges.
26:15If it's too thick, it won't do that. If it's too wet, it just spills over the sides.
26:20So getting it absolutely right is critical to the quality of the mortar.
26:26Working like this, the wall builders could stack bricks high and build the thousands of tall towers needed to shelter
26:33the Great Wall's vast standing army.
26:39These fighting men, far away from civilization, stood alone against nomad attack.
26:48William Lindsay is exploring how the wall's architecture kept the men safe, even when the nomads invaded.
26:57Just imagine, you're a Chinese defender. Here you stand.
27:04As an attacker, I don't stand a chance. The defender is six feet above me.
27:12Switched position.
27:14Got the height advantage. Left hand the shield. Here, a sword, a spear, a cudgel. This is really a brilliant
27:24accessory fortification.
27:27But hand-to-hand combat wasn't the only form of defense.
27:32Chinese technological prowess provided the soldiers with a formidable arsenal of weapons.
27:38This terrace is actually a cannon platform. Of course, the cannon's god, but the barrel would be here.
27:46You might think this big boomer is the most devastating weapon on the wall.
27:51Actually, it creates a lot of noise. It has the fear factor.
27:56But it takes so long to reload. So slow. It's so finicky in the windy, wet weather.
28:03It's actually not the most reliable weapon.
28:07For something more versatile than the cannon, the soldiers on the wall employed a far more accurate and deadly tool.
28:17The crossbow.
28:20This ferocious weapon was more than a match for the nomads' composite bows.
28:25And it was the weapon of choice for the Chinese soldiers manning the wall.
28:31This gun was the most powerful weapon of a single-兵 battle.
28:39Yang Fuxi has a copy of the crossbow's trigger mechanism, a wonder of its age.
28:45This is a silver bullet. The材質 is silver bullet.
28:47At that time, we had to build the weapon.
29:01The crossbow trigger was the world's first mechanical weapon.
29:06It released the bolt in a split second to fire with incredible accuracy.
29:13Soldiers often dipped bolts in poison to make sure that even a scratch was fatal.
29:22The watchtowers protruded from the wall.
29:25This way, its defenders could catch attackers in a deadly crossfire.
29:33Behind the wall battlements, soldiers dropped stone bombs and fired cannons.
29:42But the crossbow was still the weapon of choice.
29:54The Chinese created an industrial production line to cast crossbow triggers by the thousands.
30:00Its incredible design meant that the Chinese could deploy a vast army of soldiers
30:05who could operate the crossbow without either skill or strength.
30:31But weapons alone couldn't deter the raiders.
30:36Clandestine measures would be necessary.
30:46The Great Wall of China was strategically designed for soldiers and their weapons of war.
30:52This hole was for anchoring the crossbow.
30:55A standard bow mounted on a stock, underneath is a knob.
30:58It goes in there and it allows the user to quickly lever back, reload, wait until he sees his target.
31:05And fire.
31:11But the mighty crossbow could only protect the warriors for so long.
31:16Isolated in small watchtowers high in the mountains and deep in the deserts.
31:22The soldiers were sometimes in need of support from their comrades.
31:27So imagine being a Chinese soldier stationed on the wall.
31:31Suddenly over the horizon comes three, four hundred horsemen with dust trailing behind them.
31:37You have to wonder what on earth they would do when they saw something like that.
31:41Great Wall explorer Richard Fairbrother is at the edge of the Gobi Desert.
31:47He's looking for evidence of the intelligence network that kept the men in the watchtowers connected.
31:53Over the crest of this hill is an ancient beacon tower.
31:57And the soldiers on the beacon towers had one job.
31:59And that was to look out for the enemy and when you saw them coming, raise the alarm.
32:05The Chinese needed a way to defend against the nomads' lightning speed.
32:10Their solution?
32:12Signalling.
32:15Each of these flags represented five hundred horsemen.
32:20And so in this case, we have three flags.
32:23So that means fifteen hundred horsemen coming on the horizon.
32:28The signalling system allowed Chinese intelligence to track the nomads' rapid movements.
32:34So I'm hoping that the guys at the next tower are paying attention and notice that there's fifteen hundred warriors
32:41coming across the horizon.
32:43The tower guards would also send smoke signals to ram the message home.
32:49This rapid response to a nomad attack was crucial to the defence of the wall and to the defence of
32:55China.
32:57Great Wall's not just a defensive structure, it's also part of an intelligence network.
33:01On that side, nomadic warriors constantly looking for places that they can attack with surprise.
33:07And on the wall, Chinese soldiers looking out for the signs of that attack.
33:10If they see it, they raise the alarm down the network of beacon towers.
33:15This system of watchtowers and signalling stations needed to be impenetrable, stretching right along China's northern frontier to its end
33:23point, 72 feet into the Yellow Sea.
33:26Thanks to its ingenious design, this structure is still standing.
33:35Known as the Dragon's Head, solid granite strips, each weighing over three tons, provide the bulk to fight off the
33:42waves.
33:45Iron clamps lock them securely together.
33:49And joints carved into the stones fix the layers tight to stop them drifting with the tide.
34:01Nine layers of stone blocks stand against the crashing waves to ensure invaders can't get around.
34:08This nearly 50 foot high tower is a monumental end to the Great Wall.
34:14The wall and its signalling system were connected from this ocean fortress in the east to the deserts in the
34:21west.
34:23It meant that the Chinese army was fully prepared to protect the entire country.
34:29Soldiers would be manning the battlements with their bows and their crossbows, unleashing showers of arrows and crossbow bolts down
34:38on the enemy.
34:40But in the midst of a deadly attack, how were reinforcements able to reach these remote watchtowers in time?
34:55The Great Wall was built as a defensive shield stretching across the vast land of China.
35:01But when under attack, how did Chinese reinforcements get to isolated watchtowers atop such tough terrain?
35:14One of the primary jobs of the guards in towers like that was to watch for the enemy.
35:20As soon as they were spotted, make an alarm signal to summon reinforcements to this location.
35:29Great Wall historian William Lindsay is walking the wall at Jianco, north of Beijing.
35:36He's looking for evidence that reveals how troops maneuvered to fight off raids at the top of mountain ridges.
35:44People often look at this and they say, come on, they didn't need a defense wall there.
35:49No one is going to attack this spot. I agree, you can really appreciate that more as you're standing under
35:55it.
35:57I mean, look at that. It's just clinging to the cliff face.
36:01So why did the Chinese build the wall on this steep stretch? Did it have another purpose?
36:08That is a missing link. It's to join up. The wall here, the wall over there, the wall over there.
36:16It makes the border wall into a border road system.
36:26William believes the wall was a roadway that gave support troops immediate access to soldiers under attack.
36:36This converted the wall into a vast transport network.
36:46It extended thousands of miles to China's western desert where it performed its final function.
36:53To protect Chinese trade.
36:58The ancient trading route called the Silk Road stretched through the far west of China.
37:04The road was the nation's link to the outside world.
37:11Richard Fairbrother is driving along the Silk Road hunting out its connections to the Great Wall.
37:25Like Silk Road travelers of the past, he picks up supplies at the market in Dunhuang.
37:44And heads out into the harsh cold of the western desert.
37:49He's looking for a desert fortress.
37:59Oh, that's awesome.
38:07This amazing fort is over 2,000 years old.
38:11It's right on the Silk Road.
38:12It's called Shanmachang, which literally translates as horse castration fort.
38:19It's in a glorious location with huge mountains and this river that's ripped the side of the fort away.
38:27And it was a place where horses were castrated before being accepted by the Chinese Empire in trade for tea.
38:37The Great Wall and the forts alongside it kept the traders along the Silk Road safe.
38:48The trade along the Silk Road was crucial to the Chinese Empire.
38:51And that's why they built the Great Wall and all of these forts dotted along it.
38:58But inviting foreign traders into their forts made the Chinese vulnerable.
39:03Despite their enthusiasm for commerce,
39:06the Chinese were wary that foreign traders might actually be nomad spies.
39:12So they designed their forts so that just one false move would result in a gruesome end.
39:21Below the gatehouse, a narrow passage funneled visitors into the feared passageways of death.
39:28The walls created a maze for the intruders to navigate.
39:37Traversing right-angled turns,
39:41forcing them into the confined courtyard,
39:44this nearly 33-foot-tall trap was deadly for unwanted visitors.
39:52As guards on the parapets loomed above with weapons,
39:57this was the perfect gateway to protect China's land.
40:04The Great Wall was a monumental piece of military engineering
40:08that allowed China to face down the terror from the north.
40:13The Great Wall, the Great Wall, the Great Wall,
40:14Just looking at the wall and seeing how it snakes over these mountain tops,
40:18you realise that it is an incredible achievement.
40:22It goes across China.
40:28This is the world's most labour-intensive, material-consuming
40:32and time-consuming construction in our history.
40:36I really believe it is the ultimate wonder of the world.
40:43I love the Great Wall.
40:45I love the Great Wall.
40:45It might sound a bit nerdy, but I have a saying,
40:47if you're tired of the Great Wall, you're tired of life.
40:52The Great Wall protected China's farmers
40:57and projected the nation's imperial power along the world's most important trade route.
41:03The feeling of history, being here, being perhaps the only person who's been here in some time,
41:08is hard to describe. It's just awesome.
41:13From a self-cementing earth wall to an impenetrable line of brick fortifications,
41:20defensive battlements, deadly mazes, and a walkway that expands a country,
41:27combined to create the ultimate achievement in military architecture,
41:33and one of the most awe-inspiring structures ever created.
41:45The Great Wallet
41:45The Great Wallet
41:49The Great Wallet
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