National Geographic China's Great Wall: In March, 1907, Aurel Stein, a British explorer and adventurer, and his caravan make their way through the Taklimakan desert. Giant ruins grab their attention: it is the Jade Gate, the westernmost point of a more than two-thousand-year-old fortification system. The walls, once built with clay and straw, are barely identifiable in some parts, but the fortification must have had great significance in the past. Travel back in time to around 130 BC. For centuries, belligerent nomads from the north have been raiding, looting and pillaging Chinese settlements. The contrast could not be more pronounced: wild horsemen roaming the desert on the one side, on the other a population of settled farmers. Following a campaign against the "barbarians," Emperor Wudi of the Han dynasty decides to build a wall against the enemies. Construction starts near the location where Aurel Stein would find the ruins of the Jade Gate two thousand years later. Thousands of forced labour convicts were sent to the northwestern part of China, and thousands paid with their lives. Although the wall of the Han Dynasty crumbled into dust, subsequent dynasties built their own walls up to form the stone wall that became a monumental structure and a global icon.

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