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The Great Wall: A Cultural History. By Carlos Rojas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. xv, 213 pp. $24.95 (cloth).

2011; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0021911811001124

1752-0401

Frances Wood,

Philippine History and Culture

The title and sub-title accurately describe a slim but dense account of China's Great Wall. It includes two major sections on wall building as well as much material on the legends and literature and art objects and events associated with the Great Wall over 2000 years. In his chapters “Aspirations of Immortality” and “A Garden of Forking Paths,” Rojas sets out the actual construction of the various walls, tracing the primary event to “a decision made in 215 BCE.” His account offers a substantial and important counter-balance to Arthur Waldron's thesis that the Great Wall hardly existed between that early effort and the substantial re-building of the 16th century, a theory that is also contradicted by the many photographs of the Wall and subsidiary pise constructions of the Han dynasty taken by Sir Aurel Stein in Gansu in the first decades of the 20th century.Rojas's discussion of the various terms for walls, borders, and fortifications is admirably clear and he sets out the major Chinese folk legends associated with the Wall, its construction, and its significance such as those of Lady Meng Jiang and Wang Zhaojun. He also discusses the clever use of the Wall in Kafka and Borges's short stories, where Kafka posits a system of building that creates inherent gaps in both the Wall and Chinese society but for Borges it is above all a metaphor, a symbol of the contradictions in Qin Shi Huangdi's concurrent acts of construction and destruction. Rojas is interesting on the appearance of the Wall on Chinese maps at periods in Chinese history when it was of no great significance and he gives an amusing account of the great (though fundamentally unimportant) debate on whether the Wall is visible from the moon or, as Joseph Needham put it, tongue in cheek, capable of being “picked out by Martian astronomers.”An acute observer of the current cultural scene in China (and a notable translator of current Chinese fiction), Rojas follows the Wall, symbolic or actual, through the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games, onto bank-notes and visas, through pyrotechnic experiments which are modern versions of the Han dynasty beacon signaling system across the desert, to Xu Bing's mass rubbing of the stones at Simatai. Modern art involvement sometimes echoes the past: the half-naked He Chenyao recalling her mother's madness reminds us of the destructive grief of Lady Meng Jiang, and the use of the stones of the Wall in Lin Yilin's sculpture (and in Dai Houying's fiction, not mentioned here) as a metaphor for the Chinese people has become almost a cliché.Rojas has missed little in his survey of the cultural history of the Great Wall and he is particularly good on film, although sometimes his threads are a little difficult to follow as in his discussion of Street Angel (1937). The description of the newspaper covered walls of a newspaper peddler's hovel as ‘another distinctive wall’ seems to stretch the metaphor a little far.Presumably intended for university undergraduates, it should be of considerable interest to many others, although readers from outside the strictly academic area may find some of the references to Foucault, Kant, Nietzsche, Frege, and Michel de Certeau off-putting. The introduction of “theory” can often date an otherwise enduring work, for nothing goes out of fashion faster.