The Great Wall of China

by Geremie R. Barmé

The Great Wall of China consists of 13 essays divided into 6 themes on various aspects of the Walls. There is no single Wall but a series of smaller walls - the oldest is dated 688 BC, but the main construction was happening in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The book considers the Walls from historical, defensive, conservationist and touristic perspectives. It accompanies an exhibition held in the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. The text combines scholarly and accessible essays with interviews of local people's experience of the Walls.

Genres: History

304 pages, Paperback

First published February 5, 2007

About the author

Geremie R. Barmé is an historian, cultural critic, filmmaker, translator and web-journal editor who works on Chinese cultural and intellectual history from the early modern period (1600s) to the present. He is Founding Director of the Australian Centre on China in the World in the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific, The Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, where he also edits the online e-journal China Heritage Quarterly.

Reviews

[Matt Kuhns]

This is a decent choice if you're looking for an overview of the Great Wall(s), but it gets no more than three stars in that category as a result of being kind of an odd duck… if not a platypus. The Great Wall of China is sort of a coffee-table book; it's sort of an anthology of academic essays. It's half history of the great wall; it's half museum-exhibit catalog. It's sort of a popular-audience introduction to the Great Wall; it's sort of a stilted, politically managed co-production of academics from two entirely separate cultures.

It is not at any point a coherent, single narrative of the history of the walls. This, I think, diminishes its appeal as a general-audience work. Additionally, while some sections can be interesting, particularly the handful of first-person accounts of life near the wall, the engaging passages seem to be mixed randomly with material as dry as the Gobi desert. The pages of artifacts from the exhibit for which this book was produced, especially, are over-long; the objects themselves may be fascinating but much of the descriptive text is deadly dull.

I rate the book three stars because, with its faults, it was still readable. The photography is gorgeous, and the information is frequently interesting even when the writing is lifeless; every time it perks up for a bit the book temporarily gains a star or two.

Bottom line: consider this if you see it, but don't go to much trouble to seek it out.