The Great Wall of China
When faced with a threat or simply with contact with what we learned in graduate school to call The Other, our natural instinct is to build a wall to keep Them out or to keep Us in. *
The earliest cities that we know of, the tel culture in what is now Palestine, were built on hills and surrounded by massive defensive walls built of rubble mortared together with mud. As cities grew, so did the walls. Sometimes they were built of mud brick, as in ancient Mesopotamia. Sometimes they were built of stone, as in pretty much anywhere in medieval Europe. They worked pretty well as an way to defend a city until the arrival of gunpowder from China changed the nature of siege warfare in the fifteenth century.
Walls on a grander scale have been less successful. Take, for instance, the grandest wall of all, the Great Wall of China.**
The simple version is that the wall was built, beginning around 220 BCE as a military defense system in northern China against inroads by horse-riding "barbarians" from the steppes.*** In fact, the wall was not a single wall. It was a series of fortifications and watch towers built over several centuries beginning around 220 BCE along a 13,000 mile border.*** * (More or less. The wall ruins haven’t been surveyed so we don’t actually know how long it was. And the border wasn’t a fixed point across the centuries.) Most of what we think of as the Great Wall of China was built during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).
Moreover, wall-building wasn’t something that all members of the Chinese political classes agreed about, even in the Ming Dynasty. Building the wall was expensive in terms of both silver and lives. At any given point in Chinese history, there were men in power who believed that trade and peaceful coexistence with the nomads would be more effective than trying to keep them out. Folk songs lamenting the death of men forced into working on the wall suggests that peasants and urban laborers were even less enthusiastic. In short wall-building was a policy that people disagreed about.
The thing the wall did best was define who the barbarians were: civilized Han on one side of the wall and everyone else on the other side of the wall. But it didn't keep the barbarians out. The Mongols and their predecessors continued to raid across the wall--and to ride through the long open stretches where no wall existed. More importantly, they also traded and intermarried with people on the Chinese side of the wall, who lived a long way from the places where people made the decision to keep the barbarians out. Mongols at the gates with horses to sell were doubtless more compelling that mandarins in Beijing with an axe to grind.
Prior to the rise of Communist China, when the wall became an official symbol of China's greatness, Chinese historians described the wall as an example of what professor Arthur Waldron described as "a symbol of futility, waste, cruelty, bad policy." Today the Great Wall of China is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It also draws thousands of tourists from across the world each year--so much for keeping the barbarians out.
*In the case of the Berlin Wall,the goal was to do both.
**The runner-up for the most famous wall in history, Hadrian’s wall, was roughly 68 miles in length. A toy wall by comparison. At least in length.
***Some of my favorite historical people
****No matter what you may read, you can't see the Great Wall from the moon.
Asia’s Inland Trade, or How the Spice Trade Worked
The official trading area of the Dutch East India Company
The way we learn the story in elementary school in the United States, European trading companies sailed East in search of spices and other luxury goods. What those merchants took with them to trade is generally left unmentioned--perhaps because it makes it clear that Europe was a backwater in the global marketplace until well into the eighteenth century.
The truth is that in the early centuries of the Asian trade most European-made merchandise was a dud in the Asian marketplace. Some products, like mechanical clocks and toys, were too expensive for any but the wealthiest to purchase. Others, like heavy woolen cloth, were simply not useful or appealing. The only thing Europeans had that Asian were interested in was precious metal from the mines in Latin America.
The Portuguese, who controlled the trade routes from Europe to Asia for almost a hundred years, were content to pay silver for the luxury goods that reached their Indian stronghold at Goa. When the Dutch entered the spice trade in 1595 , they didn't have the luxury of paying for everything with hard currency. It was too expensive to simply trade with the Indies. Instead they learned to trade within the Indies: carrying goods from one Asian market to another as part of what they called the "inland trade".
The Dutch didn't invent the inland land. Merchants from all over Asia bought and sold goods at busy seaports along the Red Sea, on the coast of India, throughout the Indonesian archipelago, and in China and Japan. Islamic merchants in the Persian Gulf shipped raw cotton, coffee, dried fruits and nuts, and attar of roses across the Indian Ocean. Chinese merchants sold silks, tea, porcelain and zinc. India produced printed cotton textiles that were popular throughout Asia. South East Asia was the source for pepper, sandalwood, spices, and ivory.
Asia ships seldom sailed all the way from the Persian Gulf to China. Instead, an Arab ship would sail from Mokha to Surat and back. An Indian merchant would travel between Surat and Java. Chinese junks controlled the trade between Canton and Bantam. A chest of tea or a load of pepper would be bought and sold several times , and transported from port to port in several different ships.
Instead of concentrating on trade between two ports, the way most Asian merchants did, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) traded throughout the entire system, trading one type of goods for another, which was then used to buy a third. From one end of the chain to the other, Dutch traders handled more than one hundred Asian products, including raw silk, sandalwood, saltpeter, tin, opium, and cowry shells. Each item was bought for a low price in the place where it was made and then sold for a higher price in another part of Asia in which it was in demand.
In order to make the most of this complicated series of trades, the VOC set up a network of permanent trading stations along the major trade routes in Asia--a process that often involved violence against local rulers and other European merchants. By 1785, the company had roughly 20,000 employees in twenty settlements spread across Asia, including company-owned spice plantations in Indonesia and walled warehouses in port cities in China, Japan, and India.
The spice trade--more than just pepper.
Imprisoned
In 1979, at the age of 56, Italian writer and artist Arturo Benvenuti and his wife drove across Europe in a motor home in search of former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. He saw the journey as a secular Via Crucis—a pilgrimage in which the Stations of the Cross were Auschwitz, Terezin, Mauthausen and Buchenwald. He met with dozens of concentration camp survivors, many of whom shared not only their stories but the artwork they created in the camp.
Benvenuti originally published those drawings in 1983, under the title KZ, the German acronym for Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp. He chose drawings only from people who had a direct experience with the camps. Most were drawn by internees during their time in the camps, though a few were drawn by soldiers who entered the camp as liberators.
The drawings vary in their skill, but not in their power. Some are the work of professional artists. Most are the work of what Benvenuti describes as "bonafide 'naifs". A few were made by children. Primo Levi summed up their effect in the foreword, saying that words are insufficient to describe the horrors of the camps but these drawings "say what the word is not able to."
Benvenuti's work has recently been released in a new edition, titled Imprisoned: Drawings from Nazi Concentration Camps. The new edition includes several poems by Benvenuti and several explanatory essays but leaves the arrangement of the drawings untouched and uninterpreted. As Benvenuti intended, the book is both a work of art and an act of testimony.
This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.