From the tower the President gazes downwards, watching the wall as it snakes in and out of the valleys to eventually cross the mountain top, disappearing into a misty gorge. The President ruminated. Half a millennium before the coming of Jesus Christ, China, a collect of warring states, had been united by the Ch’in. The first Chinese Emperor, Ch’in Shih Huang, had built the first long wall stretching from the Jade Gates in the west to the western edge of the Yellow Rivers northern loop in the east, enclosing the Ordos desert. Many walls were already in place, some far out on the Gobi desert built to disrupt the barbarian trade routes to the Tarim basin, the Orkos river district, and to the capital of Genghis Kahn at Karakorum. Others were scattered piecemeal across the areas of battle in the south, forming a type of sea wall, forcing the waves of invaders to find another route. With defeat China had retreated behind the Ordos building a wall across its southern boundary.

These walls have interested philosophers and historians of our own age. Voltaire attributed China’s superior civilization to the seclusion granted by the wall. Toynby places all types of continuous walls on his maps giving the impression that ancient China was at the same stage of technological development as was 20th century Europe. The President has a vague sense of unease.

‘There was no single great wall, but a multitude of walls’, went the thought train; ‘some abandoned as the situation changed, others crumbling from neglect, others used as building material by peasant farmers.’

During the last dynasty, that of the Manchu Ch’ing, the wall had sat in the middle of the empire, signifying nothing, the Chinese border well to the north. During the reign of the T’ang’s walls were ignored, preference given to the newly introduced light cavalry in the endless fight against the barbarian. Before them the Han had combined wall building with a policy of tribute, diplomacy and military destabilization.

The train of thought jumped forwards by hundreds of years. A patriotic song written in the thirties by a Tsien Han, ‘The March of the Volunteers’ to be later used in a film made in 1935, 'The Children of the Storm’, its theme: the building of another great wall of human flesh in order to keep out the Japanese invader, the song eventually adopted by the Peoples Republic of China as its national anthem.

A glimpse back into the past, the wall propped up by the skeletons of its builders, a type of gulag where dissidents and other undesirables were sent to end their days. The keening of a barbarian flute somewhere out in the desert, the robed Chinese soldier guarding the wall shivering.

A flash forward, the wall now a symbol of media manipulation, a trade mark for countless products denoting a safety and reliability that never really existed. Mao, who fancied himself as the embodiment of the first Chinese Emperor Ch’in Shih Huang looked on, a benign smile upon his face.

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