Re: The Tocharian Documentary "Mystery of the Mummies" = Confusing/Inaccurate
From: Duncan Craig (dunkers_at_pacbell.net)
Date: 08/09/04
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Date: 9 Aug 2004 09:06:04 -0700
Tak To <takto@alum.mit.edu.-> wrote in message news:<NtCdneq9u_dQjorcRVn-pA@comcast.com>...
> Duncan Craig wrote:
> > You're both correct. The rammed earth walls of Shih Huang Ti were
> > built to repel the Hsiung-nu.
>
> More like stone and bricks instead of rammed earth.
>From what I understand, the Chin walls were hastily built and eroded
quickly.
Aurel Steins account of the Kansu corridor wall near the Yu-men Gate
said that it was composed of bundled twigs six inches thick with
layers of gravel and coarse clay. (Stein, Ruins of Desert Cathay,
London Macmillan 1912 p63).
Unlike the Han walls, the walls built by the Ming were faced with
stone and date only from the sixteenth century and required years for
the completion of short stretches.
<Qin2 Shi3
> Huang2> (as he was generally called in Chinese history text>
> did not start from scratch either. There were existing walls
> here and there built by the various warring states before Qin
> conquered them all. <Qin Shi Huang> repaired these wall and
> built new sections to join them together.
Yes, and by joining what had been feudal town border walls it signaled
the
emergence of a unified state.
>
> > What we in the west think of as the
> > Great Wall was built by the Ming to keep the Mongols on the other side
> > of the Ordos.
>
> The Great Wall was maintained to various degree of war-readiness
> through out the centuries. It was true that the Ming government
> spent a lot of effort in maintaining and rebuilding it.
>
> > The term 'Great Wall' wasn't known until the nineteenth
> > century.
>
> Not sure what you mean. The Great Wall was known as <Chang2 Cheng2>
> ("Long Wall") throught Chinese history.
>
> Tak
Thats interesting. I don't speak Chinese, but have examined that
term. First,
the term 'Great Wall' seems to be a western appellation that has
seeped back in to Chinese usage. According to Arthur Waldron:
"Final confirmation of our contentioon that no single Great Wall
ever existed in China, and that the idea of one can only confuse us,
however, is found in the evidence of the Chinese language itself. If
an ancient Great Wall had existed, it almost certainly would have had
a single fixed name, just as mountains, rivers, temples, etc. do,
which would have been used consistently. When dynasties restored or
repaired that Wall, as we are told they did, they would have used that
name. Yet when we turn to the vocabulary used by Chinese to describe
wall-building, we find not a single name, but rather a range of terms
and usages that are utterly inconsistent with such a situation.
Unfortunately, the existence of this range of terminology is often
obscured by the use of the English term "The Great Wall" to translate
a number of different Chinese words and phrases, as well as by the
problem created in modern times by the translation of that Western
term back into Chinese.
"The commonest of the Chinese phrases usually translated as
"Great Wall" is ch'ang-ch'eng, a term which can be found in the Shih
Chi (1st cent. bc). But since the words are used there to refer to a
variety of walls built both by Chinese and nomads, they cannot mean
"The Great Wall". Rather they must be read as "long wall" or "walls".
(Waldron The Great Wall of China From History to Myth Cambridge
University Press 1990 p27)
Apparently the Ming used the term 'pien-ch'iang' meaning 'border
walls', because it wanted to avoid 'ch'ang ch'eng' and its association
with Shih Huang Di.
In todays standard editions of dynastic histories, ch'ang ch'eng is
side-scored as if it were a proper noun, yet according to Waldron and
others, it is not; as an examination of the historical texts show.
Being unable to speak Chinese, however, I must rely on the testimonies
of those who do.
Duncan Craig
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