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Great Wall of China: From Beginning to End

Michael Yamashita

THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA is among the few works created by human hands that exceed the descriptive power of language.

Everything about it—its 4,000-mile length, the 1,800 years it took to complete, the incalculable amount of materials and human labor required to build it—staggers the imagination. Extending across deserts, seeming to defy gravity as it rises up mountainous terrain where even walking is a challenge, it is difficult to understand how this immense civil engineering project was carried out using only the most rudimentary tools and materials.

It is a monument to mankind’s ambition that has not, and may never be, surpassed in terms of scale and sheer audacity. It is unique in human history.

Once marking the northernmost frontier of the Empire, it now runs through the heart of peasant China.

Here lie the poorest regions, where the climate is at its harshest, where rainfall is rare and the ground is hard, where the desert meets cultivated soil. This is the China least reported on, the China least touched by today’s economic revolution. It is this China that I find most compelling to photograph—the traditional China that is fast disappearing, the China I fell in love with when I first visited in 1982.