There is information about the history and legends of the Great Wall.

Qi Jiguang gave a banquet and arranged seats.

During Jiajing period, Qi Jiguang was stationed on the border of Jimen. At that time, "he was just in his early days, with a small official position, and he spoke softly and didn't attract attention." Ten years later, from the first year of Qin Long (67 years), Kyoto faced the invasion of Anda tribe. The Ming rulers quickly transferred the famous anti-Japanese Qi Jiguang from the south to guard the Great Wall. This "capital defense zone" was originally a place where "generals are not allowed to enter". The leader's gate and the main mountain follow suit, embezzling soldiers, protecting officials, and embezzling city funds. When Qi Jiguang first came, he was in charge of defensive training in Jizhou, Changping and Baoding. Although he has a great reputation, it is difficult to open the situation for a while. Fortunately, Tan Lun, the guardian of Ji, once cooperated with Qi in the war against Japan on the southeast coast. This is another * * *, and he fully supported Qi Jiguang's cause. They agreed to gather 3000 anti-Japanese soldiers from Yiwu, Zhejiang. These battle-hardened veterans have become the backbone of Qi Jiguang. He is not only a model of demonstration, but also an instructor who teaches the defenders of border towns to ride horses, ride horses and March. At the same time, they also helped Qi Jiguang rebuild the city wall, which was short and broken, and "high enough to keep people away, walk the sheep, and the wall was male, so it was not sheltered from the wind and the sun". Up to now, in the Ming Dynasty on the Great Wall, there are still the names of Zhejiang officials on the "inscription tablet": Tan Lun and Qi Jiguang jointly built the Great Wall, urging the officials to build one section each, and each section was in their charge. And personally visited the mountains. Check the project. They saw that the quality of the city wall was good and uneven, and there was a great difference. At the end of the first phase of the project, they held a big banquet in the Governor's Office and sorted the seats according to their advantages and disadvantages. The best one sits in the hatchback of the hall. The second sat in the porch, the third sat in the entrance of the yamen, and the worst sat outside. After this clear seating arrangement, officials will not dare to cut corners again when they start work again; The material is perfunctory, and the material cost is also greatly saved. A few years ago, the cost of side walls was tens of thousands, and the effect was not great. After the completion of the whole project, the government will spend 654.38 million lines (copper coins) every year, which can match the usage of1.20 million lines in previous years.

Qinglong inverted water absorption

Starting from the parking lot at Tianxiangoukou of Zhangjing Highway, there is a square iron cover at the foot of the north side of the highway not far away, which seems to cover the sewer. In fact, there used to be a clear spring there. The hillside next to the iron cover is an ochre-red stone cliff, and there is a blue-gray stone ridge in the stone cliff, which goes down the mountain and extends to the iron cover. The stone ridge is about 20 cm wide with mottled joints and folds. Together with qingquan, it is called "Qinglong inverted water suction". In ancient China, "Qinglong", "White Tiger", "Suzaku" and "Xuanwu" often represented geographical orientation. The location of "Green Dragon Sucking Water" is just to the east of Badaling Guancheng, echoing the steep mountains in the southwest of Guancheng, crouching like a tiger and staring at the peaks inside and outside Guancheng, which constitutes the dangerous pass of "Dragon Panhu Juju", so the wonder of "Green Dragon" is particularly famous. In ancient times, there was a stone bridge across the mountain stream in Guangou, so it was named "Qinglong Bridge". The Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway set up a station nearby, also called Qinglong Bridge Station. The Qinglong here is famous for its "inverted water absorption". Because its ridge is wet all the year round, it seems that the head of a "dragon" has reached into the spring pool and sucked up. According to geological survey, "Qinglong Strange Rock" is a dike formed by underground magma soaking and solidification along cracks, with dense and hard texture and not easy to weather. Red granite is stored on both sides of the dike, with poor hardness. After vicissitudes of life, wind and rain erosion, layers of peeling and weathering, the "Qinglong" stands out significantly. At the same time, because granite cracks are easy to seep, when the water on both sides reaches this blue vein, the blue vein does not seep, forming a trickle that drips down along both sides of the vein and is stored in the root spring pool, just like "water absorption". Now the mountains are not rich in vegetation and lack of water. "Qinglong" depends on it, but there is no water to "suck".

Zongxisaguangou road

In the 28th year of Yuan Dynasty (1368), Zhu Zaiying was enthroned by Doctor (Nanjing). People's Republic of China (PRC) was founded in the Ming Dynasty. At that time, Xu Da was named General Lu, who was responsible for capturing the Yuan Dynasty (now Beijing). Xu Da led the troops in the Northern Expedition, fought all the way and was invincible. On July 27th, Tongzhou and most cities are just around the corner. Without Hui Zong's due joy, I got the news, and I was frightened. He first consulted with empresses and princes in Qingning Hall, hoping to avoid soldiers going north. Then the ministers were called in Duanmingtang to express their opinions. After hearing this, the ministers expressed their opinions one after another, and the hall was in chaos. Eunuch Bo Yan didn't need to burst into tears and said, "Your Majesty should stick to the world created by his ancestor Kublai Khan. How can you abandon it? " Tuohuan timur lingered in the temple for a while and said with a sigh, "Today, how can I be the second emperor of Qin Hui in the Song Dynasty!" He thinks it's better to escape than to be captured. In the darkness of this day, he led his concubines, princes and some ministers to escape from Dadubei by opening Jiandemen. At dawn, the royal chariots and horses and their party have already walked on the road of Guangou. He is familiar with this road, but when he came here today, he had mixed feelings and couldn't help sighing. After the Yuan Dynasty made Beijing (mostly) its capital, it called the former old capital and forest (now Zhenglan Banner in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region) the capital. Every year from April to September, the emperor spends his summer in the mountains. Returning to most areas after autumn, "I am used to it." "The capital is in summer, and birds can still know dragons." Guan Gou is the only way for emperors of past dynasties to go back and forth, so they have been focusing on development, large-scale construction, widening roads, carving Buddha statues on cliff walls in dangerous areas, building temples beside roads and begging for the blessing of the gods. The largest is Yongming Temple in Dabao Township, with gardens, palaces where the emperor stayed and magnificent crossing towers. The site of Duta is the "Yuntai" that can still be seen today. At that time, Guangou Road was very lively. A monk wrote a poem: "Ten miles in the gravel, five miles in the road, a thousand cars meet ten thousand cars." This time, I escaped on the pass road. I was sad all the way and couldn't help but burst into tears. It's painful to think about the life of "ladies-in-waiting" day and night, and the future is uncertain. It's noon now, just in front of the crossing tower of Yongming Temple. This pagoda was built with suitable jars and paste on the anniversary of Moore's accession to the throne 10. I thought that the Zen spirit could protect the country forever, but after years of internal and external troubles, the country was shaken. As usual, the monks in the temple quickly set up an altar, lit candles and incense. After standing for a while, I hurried on with a sad face. At dusk, the car rode to Badaling Pass. Under the red gate of Peking University, he turned and looked at the foggy south. He seemed to see the dim metropolis, sobbing, and tears blurred his eyes ... and bid farewell to Guangou Imperial Road. Moore's gleeful escape to the north is a sign of the demise of the Yuan Dynasty. Zhu praised him for "quitting after knowing his destiny" and gave him the title of "Shun Di" after his death.

The Great Wall has changed from an exotic building to a cultural symbol of "invention" for interpretation. Western culture has established a specious analogy relationship between the Great Wall and some "China characteristics" bit by bit, such as the Great Wall and a huge empire, a closed, conservative, stagnant and spatialized civilization, and so on. The Great Wall has changed from history to myth. The myth tradition or discourse of the Western Great Wall provides Kafka's novels with basic material, narrative angle, symbol and its significance, as well as the historical depth of symbolic significance. The tradition of China image formed in the 7th century in the West emerged in the context of When the Great Wall of Wan Li was Built, which endowed Kafka's seemingly absurd novel with profound "Sinology" significance.

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The Great Wall of Wan Li stops at the northernmost tip of China ... 19 17. In March and April, Kafka stayed in his small room in the narrow Jewish old city of Prague and wrote a novel, When was the Great Wall of Wan Li built? What puzzles this novel is not only its theme, but also its significance. This novel tells a fantastic and mysterious story: from an unimaginable long time, China people began to build the Great Wall of Wan Li on an imperial land that covered the sun. It is said that the purpose of building the Great Wall is to prevent the invasion of nomadic people in the north. The way to build the Great Wall is to build it in sections. Miracle is not this miraculous project, but the organization that completed it. How are the overwhelming forces gathered by countless individuals and the forces to build the Tower of Babel, the pyramids and the Great Wall of Wan Li mobilized? How do leaders combine the scattered "possibilities" of individuals into one purpose and create miracles? The key is to build in sections. The Great Wall of Wan Li is a huge project, and no one is too young to see its completion. In order to prevent people from "losing confidence in themselves, the Great Wall and the whole world" by putting stones in the wild for years, the leaders asked each team of workers to move to another place after releasing 500 meters of stones. Of course, the problem lies in this "sectional construction" method, which contradicts the purpose of building the Great Wall. "Using this method, of course, left many gaps ... It is said that some gaps have never been bridged ..." A miraculous wall, from southwest to southeast, crossed the northern border of the empire, but it was full of gaps and never coherent. How can it play a defensive role? A wall full of cracks has actually become a door.

The novel imitates some academic papers (history or sinology), and constantly analyzes the contradiction between the way of building the Great Wall (by sections) and the purpose (to defend the northern nationalities). "The Great Wall was built to defend the northern nationalities. But it is not coherent, how can it play a defensive role? " "The Great Wall can't play a defensive role, and the building itself is in constant danger." Perhaps this has some incredible absurdity for the great project itself. The novel continues to deconstruct "various legends" about the Great Wall. Not only does the way to build the Great Wall contradict its purpose, but even the so-called defense of the northern nationalities is questionable. Where thinking begins, absurdity appears. Kafka's charm lies in that everything that looks ordinary and reasonable, once it appears in his dreamlike works, exposes its terrible absurdity, and all absurdities are so ordinary and natural. When the Great Wall of Wan Li was Built is puzzling at first reading. First of all, it tells not the real Great Wall in China, but some legends about the Great Wall. The so-called "one of many legends around the Great Wall". The narrator tried to analyze these legends, but soon found that they could not stand deep thinking. Secondly, it seems that its meaning is not in the Great Wall, but in some metaphors about the Great Wall. He hopes to discover the secrets of the imperial organization in the project of building the Great Wall. The narrator said that his research on comparative national history revealed that "some private and state institutions of China people are particularly clear, while others are particularly vague". The construction of the Great Wall is essentially closely related to the state institutions in China.

When the Great Wall of Wan Li was completed, the text can be divided into two parts. The first part deconstructs the architectural style and purpose of the Great Wall and finds that the significance of the Great Wall does not lie in the Great Wall itself. The Great Wall is just a metaphor. The second part deconstructs the organization of the empire and finds that the Great Wall Empire, which is boundless in space and motionless in time, is like a whirlpool in a torrent in its power structure. It flows quickly and effectively, with no beginning or end, and its core is just an empty hole. The significance of the text lies in the metaphorical relationship between the first part of the Great Wall and the second part of the empire.

In Kafka's imagination, the Great Wall is just a legend. The real significance of building the Great Wall is not to defend against border disasters, but to organize construction. There are four kinds of characters in the novel: first, people who are erratic, naive or naive, simple or ignorant like children; Second, a visionary, kind but bossy, respectable and terrible leader like a parent; Third, an emperor who enjoys the authority of God but lives a layman's life is strong and fragile, real and nothingness; Fourth, scholars who demonstrate the mysterious theory of "fog is general" and teachers who teach the same creed as "mountains and mountains" are all participants in the great cause of building the Great Wall and builders of the empire. Let's see how the narrator organizes these four types of characters into stories.

The leader is the real commander and organizer. They plan the overall situation and organize construction. They invented "segmented architecture" because they knew that "human nature is like dust". How to organize so many people who are full of hope and disappointment like children to accomplish the grand imperial cause continuously and effectively in the long history is the key to the problem. This is how leaders mobilize the people. They know that ordinary people are easy to be disappointed and upset, and also easy to hope and get excited. Building the Great Wall may not have any practical significance, but it can effectively organize people like dust and sand into a powerful whole. As for the common people, they live a "simple" life. They don't have to think much, and they don't have to think much. The leader has thought it over for them. They just need to try their best to figure out and carry out the leaders' intentions. As for the intention of the leader, as long as you follow the instructions of the leader, you can't delve into why: "At that time, many people, even the best people, had this secret principle: try their best to understand the instructions of the leader; But once a certain limit is reached, enough is enough ... this is a very wise principle. "Building the Great Wall in sections is a plan made by the leaders according to the nature of the people and the interests of the empire. Its significance lies not in resisting foreign invasion, but in organizing an empire. Its real significance lies in "how to concentrate people's strength to participate in powerful new projects". Perhaps explanation is not enough, and scholars need to invent a grand theory (belief or ideology) to explain the great significance of this project. Therefore, a long time ago, scholars demonstrated that the Great Wall was built to build the Tower of Babel, and asserted that "only the Great Wall will create a solid foundation for a new Tower of Babel for the first time in human history. So build the Great Wall first, then the tower. " It is clear that the Great Wall has nothing to do with the Tower of Babel, but scholars have argued so eloquently, and leaders and teachers have spared no effort to publicize it ("there was a copy of this book at that time"), and the people also believe it. " They set out early in the morning, and all the villagers in half the village accompanied him on a long trip, which they all felt necessary. Along the way, people waved flags, and they saw for the first time how vast, rich, beautiful and lovely their country was. Every citizen is a compatriot and brother. It is for them that everyone is building the Great Wall of Defense, and the compatriots have given everything and returned with their lives. Unity! Unity! "Side by side, forming a chain of people, blood is no longer confined to a single body, and it circulates pitifully. But will gallop happily in the infinite China.

Building the Great Wall in sections is only a metaphor for the internal mechanism of the Chinese Empire. The second half of the novel turns from the theme of the Great Wall to the discussion of the empire itself. It is said that the decree to build the Great Wall was issued by an ancient emperor, but it seems that there is no such emperor and no emperor has issued an order to build the Great Wall. The second part of the novel discusses the central emperor of the empire through sophistry. The emperor is the mysterious center of the infinite power of the empire, but this center is likely to be empty. The emperor is not only the supreme god, but also a fragile and poor man. "Our country is so big that no fairy tale can imagine its vastness, and the sky can hardly cover it-and the capital is just a point, and the palace is just a point. As the emperor of such a country, he is naturally very big, so big that he is above everything in the world. However, the living emperor is also like us, and he is lying on the couch like us ... "The Great Wall is a legend, and the emperor is also a legend. He is the foundation of imperial organization and a vacancy in people's imagination. Maybe the empire itself is absurd, just like the Great Wall. The later the narrative of the novel, the more chaotic it becomes. There are more and more ambiguous sentences. The empire has an emperor who is "so big that he is above all things in the world", and "we" all live in his order. However, none of us can get close to him and understand him. He is in the center of the distant capital and Jiuchong Palace, in a distant dynasty that no one can tell clearly. The capital and the emperor are like "a cloud swimming quietly in the sun for thousands of years", which is unreasonable. This insurmountable distance between time and space strengthens the mystery of the empire itself. What can be metaphorical is unreasonable. The tone of the two parts of this novel is very different. The first part focuses on analysis, which often shows eloquence, while the second part focuses on ambiguous and nonsense narration, which is ambiguous and ambiguous.

The real absurdity is beyond imagination. Perhaps we can only grasp or approach the meaning of the empire by building the symbol of the Great Wall. When you really want to explain the institutions of the empire itself, you will be powerless or irrelevant. "The most ambiguous institution is the empire itself." ... Semi-open education regards the beliefs that have been deeply rooted in people's hearts for generations as a mountain and fluctuates around it. Although these beliefs have not lost their eternal truth, they are always vague in this smog. "When the Great Wall of Wan Li was built, it suddenly stopped, just like when a machine was running at high speed, the screws in the key parts suddenly collapsed.

Dreams always start and end for no reason. The Great Wall, the emperor, the leaders running on the Imperial Avenue, the people building cities in the wilderness or enjoying the cool in the courtyard, the whole empire is like an ancient floating cloud under the eternal canopy, mysterious and far away. Kafka repeatedly emphasized the vastness of the Great Wall Empire in space and the timelessness in time through different images in his novels. It is an unimaginable distance from the south of the narrator's home to the capital of the empire. Not only can ordinary people never reach or even imagine the capital, but even the imperial edict can't reach those "poor subjects who fled to the humble generation in the farthest shadow of the emperor's sun." This is a road that can't be finished for thousands of years. It is worth noting that the concept of space in the author's narrative is mostly certain, such as the capital, the south and even Tibet, while the relative concept of time is vague. The first is narrative time. The narrator said that he was 20 years old when the Great Wall was started, but the narrative seems to imply the demise of the Manchu dynasty. He repeatedly emphasized a feeling of "what is tonight". The legendary emperor of ordinary people may have been murdered thousands of years ago, and the capital has already become a garbage mountain. "Many battles in the oldest history have just been revealed", and wars and revolutions have been unable to change the empire for many years. "The dragon curled up on the small pillar at the entrance of the village is still" spraying fire in the direction of the capital to show loyalty ". The empire is in the hearts of the people, just like "a cloud that has been swimming quietly in the sun for thousands of years." An ancient empire, living in the contemporary era, has always been the same, just like the Great Wall of Wan Li, which extends in the vast imperial space, but it has remained as a stone for thousands of years.

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"The most ambiguous institution is the empire itself." Kafka told the story of the Great Wall built by the Chinese Empire, not because he really cared about or understood the Great Wall in China. The novel is just a form. In Kafka's imagination, the Millennium Empire built the Great Wall of Wan Li on an infinitely vast land. The event itself is a universal, mysterious and obviously absurd symbol. "We have some private and state institutions in China that are particularly clear, while others are particularly vague. ..... and the architecture of the Great Wall is essentially related to these problems. "

Perhaps close reading and analysis can make us vaguely feel or guess some meaning of the novel. The autocratic empire is a huge monster. Only when it works can it show its absurdity and amazing mystery. People can learn about the ancient Egyptian empire by building pyramids, the Mughal empire by building the Taj Mahal, and the Chinese empire by building the Great Wall of Wan Li. In the eyes of westerners, all the eastern empires in history have completed such a huge project that shocked the eyes and ears of the world. Only in these dazzling and incredible miracles can you understand the paternalistic authoritarian regime as complicated as a huge machine and its meaningless personal significance as a component. Kafka truly shows the existence of human beings in an authoritative and highly organized society, the relationship between individuals and collectives, leaders and people under the authoritarian system, and the integration of power efficiency measures and organizations. Building the Great Wall is just a symbol.

The key to the possibility of a novel like gobbledygook getting some explanation lies in reconstructing the meaning structure and discourse context that constitute its text. The construction of the Great Wall only appeared as a symbol when Kafka imagined and thought about the paternalistic autocratic tendency in imperial institutions and personal psychology. The question is, in Kafka's view, how did the Great Wall get this symbolic meaning? Kafka thought about the Eastern Empire in the form of novels, but put the selected materials or "skills" in China. Under what background of knowledge and imagination did the Chinese Empire study and acquire the typical images in Kafka's novels? Kafka had no direct experience in China. His creation and imagination are all in the text. What are the text pedigrees of Kafka's novels? It is not China's Great Wall or system and history that can finally explain the significance of when the Great Wall of Wan Li was built, but the western concept and imagination tradition about China and the Great Wall.

Text and its symbols gain meaning in discourse. According to Foucault's point of view, discourse is a set of internal unified and interrelated expressions related to a specific theme or object, which means a specific discipline and strategy. It provides assumptions, rules and expectations for individual text thinking and speaking. Said studied Orientalism or Orientalism from Foucault's discourse theory, and pointed out that Orientalism is a way of discourse in the post-enlightenment period when the West expressed "Orientals" as "Cultural Others". It not only contains all kinds of bizarre imaginations about the East in the West, but also means a set of serious theoretical and practical systems and power operation rules. It is distributed in "regional political awareness of aesthetics, economics, sociology, history and philosophical texts", forming a knowledge pedigree or concept group, stipulating the conceptual basis and meaning structure of individual writers' texts, and providing them with specific vocabulary, images, rhetorical skills and even motif types. Said thinks that Foucault ignores the meaning of a single text or writer, and advocates the method of "close reading of the text" to reveal "the dynamic relationship between a single text or writer and its complex text collection". He summed up his research methods as "strategic positioning" and "strategic construction", "strategic positioning, a method to describe the author's position in the text according to his works related to the East, and strategic construction, a method to analyze the relationship between the text and the text groups, the internal types of the text itself, and the method to gather, condense and gain realistic reference in a larger cultural context. I use the concept of "strategy" only to confirm the problems faced by every writer who writes about the oriental theme: how to grasp this theme, how to approach this theme, and how to avoid being frustrated or knocked down by its profundity, breadth and awesome breadth. Anyone who writes about the East must position himself with the East as the coordinate. As far as the works are concerned, this orientation includes the narrative angle he adopted, the type of structure he constructed, the flowing images in his works, and the type of theme-all of these combine to form a fine and complicated way to answer readers' questions, explore the connotation of the East, and finally express or speak on behalf of the East. However, none of this happened out of thin air. Every writer who writes about the East assumes the existence of some pioneer and some predecessors' knowledge about the East (even writers who write about Homer), and these things become the source of his reference and the basis of his foothold. In addition, every work about the East will make itself closely related to other works, readers, public institutions and the East itself. In this way, the complex relationship between works, readers and some special aspects of the East as a whole has formed a structure for analysis ... "

Although China was not included in Said's study of Orientalism, there is undoubtedly a set of words to express the image of China in modern western culture, which can be said to be Sinology or China Doctrine. It is composed of various interrelated texts about China, which provides Kafka's novels with basic materials, narrative angles, symbols and their meanings, as well as the historical depth of symbolic meanings. Text has no boundaries, it is just a knot in the discourse network. In this way, Kafka's novels and China's image discourse in the west constitute an explanatory cycle. The image of China in the west provides the meaning code for the interpretation of the novel, and the novel becomes the index of the specific aspects of the image of China in the west. The Great Wall of Wan Li ends at the northernmost tip of China. The project starts from the southeast and southwest and extends here for connection. The beginning of the novel is reminiscent of the words in Matteo Ricci's Notes on China (Chapter 13 of Volume V): "The famous Great Wall ends at the northern end of the western frontier of China". The Italian Jesuit missionary came to China from Italy more than three centuries ago and finally died in Beijing. Kafka has never been farther than Paris in his life. The way he imagines China is just to travel in the text. In fact, his writing is a process of "weaving" images and stories about China in various western texts from his reading horizon. For him, one of the most obvious signs of China is probably the Great Wall, just as Egypt is always associated with the pyramids.

In the west, the narrative about China has always been associated with the Great Wall. The Travels of Marco Polo (1298? Not mentioning the Great Wall is an important basis for people to doubt its reliability. If Kyle Poirot had really been to China, he couldn't have missed such an obvious sign. /kloc-Italian writers in the 0/7th century and British researchers in the 20th century raised this question. Later travelers seldom make such mistakes again. Portuguese Pinto's Insight into the East (1569- 1580) tells that the King of China sent prisoners to build the Great Wall, while Spanish Mendoza's History of the Great Chinese Empire (1585) specifically introduced the "500-mile-long Great Wall": "This country has a 500-mile-long wall. Guards are to guard against the Tatars ... "1655, John Niehoff accompanied the Dutch delegation to Beijing, and mentioned in his travel book" Dutch Ambassador's Visit to China "(1665):" Farmers in China told us that people could ride horses to the Great Wall and come back in one day. " Pinto, Mendoza and John Niehoff have all heard of the Great Wall directly or indirectly. The Italian missionary Martino Martini's New Map of China (1665) proves that he saw the legendary Great Wall of Wan Li with his own eyes. More and more missionaries and envoys came to China, and more and more news or praises about the Great Wall spread to the west. Father Ferdinand ferdinand verbiest said, "The seven wonders of the world together can't compare with the Great Wall of China. The description of the Great Wall in all European publications is not enough to describe the spectacular Great Wall I have ever seen. " ( 1685)

From the legends and discoveries of the Renaissance to the witness and admiration of the Enlightenment, the Great Wall, as a miracle, has gradually become a symbol of China in the western vision. The General History of Chinese Empire compiled by Father Du Huld (1735) is called the encyclopedia about China in the Enlightenment Age, which also describes that "in 2 15 BC, under the orders of Qin Shihuang, the Great Wall was built as a huge project to protect the empire from the invasion of Tatars ..." Du Hede did not express too much enthusiasm for the Great Wall, but went to an enlightenment philosopher. The encyclopedia compiled by Diderot (1765) equates the Great Wall with the pyramids. Voltaire's Theory of Customs (1756) declared that the Great Wall is "a great building beyond the pyramids of Egypt" regardless of its use and scale. Since the Enlightenment, the Great Wall has not only enjoyed a high reputation in the West, but has gradually become a symbol of China civilization. No matter what this sign means. According to Bao Si's Biography of Johnson, Dr. Johnson once expressed his enthusiasm for visiting the Great Wall of China, and considered it a real honor. Defoe, another famous Englishman, expressed different views in Robinson Crusoe (Robinson Crusoe sequel). Although the Great Wall is a "very great project", it is "too big to be used" because it can't stop the Tatar soldiers of the mob. The Great Wall has become a symbol of China's civilization, and has gradually been endowed with different or even opposite meanings. It may symbolize the greatness or strength of Chinese civilization, or it may symbolize the conservatism or weakness of Chinese civilization. The Madzar delegation visited China and witnessed the magnificence of the Great Wall. In the documentary (1797) in which the British ambassador interviewed Gan Long, Stanton, the deputy envoy, praised "such a huge project is really thrilling" and calmly analyzed the true significance of the Great Wall. If the Great Wall did prevent foreign invasion in history, its significance now is only to restrict the immigration of China people. Walls can stop foreigners and close people. Captain barreto, who accompanied the group, observed the structure of the Great Wall in detail with the eyes of a professional soldier. More than 40 years later, the British invaded China from the sea, and the Great Wall completely became a historical relic. After the Opium War, westerners went in and out of China, and many people went to the Great Wall for sightseeing. While admiring the majesty of the Great Wall, they are also reflecting on the Chinese civilization that created this miracle. From the western point of view, the Great Wall has gradually changed from a building in historical reality to a cultural symbol with obvious exotic or oriental sentiment. This mythical process took place around the Romantic Movement in19th century.

The Great Wall has become a symbol of Chinese civilization, and its mythical significance has gradually replaced its historical significance. Roland barthes believes that myth is a meaningful way and language of historical choice. A form suddenly has some rich, practical, seemingly natural and indisputable meaning, which depends entirely on some deep connection established by history between form and meaning, although this connection is often random and changeable. The so-called randomness is because the partial similarity process between form and history is not completely reasonable. Why is the Great Wall a symbol of China civilization? What are the characteristics of Chinese civilization? Change means that the form has not changed, but the meaning has changed in different times. Mendoza and Voltaire regarded the Great Wall as a powerful symbol of China, while Defoe and later Lager regarded the Great Wall as a symbol of China's weak civilization. The Great Wall is a building. In fact, it is just an ancient fortification in China. But in the image history of China in the west, it first changed from an imported building to a cultural symbol interpreted as "invention". People have gradually established a specious analogy between the Great Wall and some "China characteristics", such as the Great Wall and a huge empire, a closed and conservative civilization, stagnation and spatialization, a highly organized and enslaved civilization and so on. The Great Wall has been mythologized.

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In western culture, China's reality has become an interpreted text, or a symbolic system with a specific meaning, among which the most expressive is a core symbol, because this symbolic expression is both significant and rich in rhetorical meaning, and as a "group of words" in the public imagination, its influence is particularly extensive. For example, the pyramids are not only ancient buildings, but also symbols of Egyptian civilization, and the Great Wall has gradually acquired a specific textual meaning and become a symbol in historical time.