The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC - AD 2000 by Julia Lovell
352 pages
Published 2006
Read from September 13 to September 15
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
It
is inexplicably difficult, at least in my experience, to locate good,
wide-ranging histories of China. This is true of any non-European or
non-Anglophone part of the world, so I suppose it isn't that
inexplicable, but it's still annoying. I know John Keay (whose history
of India I quite enjoyed) wrote a similar history of China, which I've
been meaning to get my hands on, but I'll have to order that from a
different library. My own library's collection of Chinese history is
spread evenly across three equally narrow and (to me) equally
uninteresting aspects of a multi-millennium, continental-scale story:
the rise of Chinese Communism, the subjugation of Tibet, and the Great
Wall. You'd think such a vast, densely populated region of the planet,
with such a long and complex history, couldn't be boiled down to three
topics, but you'd evidently be wrong.
This book caught my eye
while I was browsing a rival library by dint of its subtitle. I took
"China Against the World" to indicate that The Great Wall was
used allegorically, a catch-all term for a history of psychological
isolationism. To an extent my hopeful interpretation was correct, but The Great Wall
is also used literally: the inception, construction, and decay of
various border fortifications forms the bulk of Lovell's topic, and the
psycho-historical analysis never gets beyond "Barbarians invade, become
emperors, and grow soft over succeeding generations, forgetting the need
for flexible offense and withdrawing behind a literal wall of
inflexible defensiveness" -- the same old "luxury corrupts" storyline
that's been a fixture of historical explanation since the glory days of
Sparta and Rome.
Lovell's prose is satisfyingly wry on occasion,
and she includes a nice number of (probably embroidered) anecdotes of
the kind I like so well, but her analysis rarely becomes more rigorous
than that one basic storyline. And while it's nice that this book isn't
100% about the various defensive walls of Chinese history, using "the
Great Wall" as a lens to examine Chinese history is still rather
limiting. Narrowness of topic I might tolerate, or shallowness of
analysis on occasion, but not both at the same time.
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