Another great killer of the Chinese people

Here's another great killer of the Chinese people: The Great Wall of China

From the web: "During the Qin Dynasty--when the first Great Wall was built--workers toiled for ten years to build the wall, at a rate of about 25 miles per month".

25 miles per month? Wow! That's a mile a day. Do you believe it? In the first place, I suspect that such a feat is impossible. In the second place, since that "fact" is from the records, and the main source of the information in those records was the supervisors of construction themselves, they are the very people whose interests exaggeration serves. it's probably fake. But still, the work must have gone on at a death dealing pace.

Today the Chinese government uses their great wall as an example of their cultural superiority . Now there lies a great and popular paradox, not confined to the Chinese. Most cultures whose roots go back to antiquity, also have a long record of disrespect for, and destruction of, their own cultural treasures. Once having made a total wreck of their own relics, they are today utterly fanatic about protecting them, invariably claiming the high moral ground, and citing how foreigners don't respect their stuff enough and how outsiders are responsible for all the spoilage. Examples abound. Egypt has closed the Great Pyramid, blaming the damage caused to its inner walls, on the sweat produced foreigners. I did not make this up. This is after those very people stole the entire limestone skin off the pyramids, not to mention the golden capstones. Hey, how about the fact that every single royal grave in Egypt was already plundered in antiquity, including that of King Tut. I mean can you believe it? The history of those people is a history of vandalism, and yet they piously claim that it's all our fault. And China, having massively destroyed its own Great Wall, is today punishing people who seek to do one billionth as much.

From the web: "The Chinese government also hopes to protect the national treasure. Officials in Beijing are considering legislation that, if passed, would convict anyone caught littering or defacing the Great Wall to a jail term of up to seven years."

Ha ha wotta joke. Can you imagine the ruthless and fearsome world power Chinese communist government prosecuting someone for littering?

Now all this is happening even to this very day. I am reminded that during the recent occupation of Afghanistan by the Taliban, those Muslims completely destroyed a huge statue of Buddha that was the single most important ancient monument left in that benighted country. And they did so for religious reasons too. And they got clean away with it too. Imagine the holy uproar that would have taken place if a single American soldier so much as put a scratch on the place.

How Many Chinamen did this kill?

The largest obelisk in ancient Egypt weighed in at 500 tons. Sheer muscle and friction built them all. Masons rubbed wooden blocks against the quarry stone while a slurry of sand and water was poured over the work surface. Slowly, very slowly, the rock was worn through. Only seldom, did these people attempt to make obelisks out of granite, which was normally far too hard. See this hyperlink:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/obelisk/bigwave.html

Interestingly, any larger obelisks, like those weighing more than 1000 tons, were left behind, unfinished and abandoned in the quarries. They are still there. Egypt, and then even Rome, once they learned their lesson, just gave up on trying to move them. It turned out that these larger projects cost far too many human lives. They can still be seen there today, unintentionally serving as the tombstone for the uncounted stone workers who died on those doomed projects.

http://www.atlantisquest.com/Baalbek.html

But the Chinese, were different. They had a secret weapon. Then as now, China had no regard for human life. That was, and still is, China's secret weapon. Around 1400 AD, China tried to build a granite tombstone for Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty. It lays there near Nanjing today, in the Yangshan quarry, unmovable then as now. Its weight is estimated to be 34,000 tons. Long before the work was attempted, Chinese engineers had to know that they could never have moved the thing an inch. After all, this rock is 34 times larger that the largest blocks that the best efforts of the Egyptians and Romans couldn't move either. The cost in human life is unknown, naturally, but as large as it was, it must have paled before the Chinese experience only a few decades just before, in the 14th century, when epidemics and famine killed 35 million people. Here is how that enormous unmovable rock looks today:

If you want to read how China was in those days, at least its navy, and see where I got this picture, read the very latest National Geographic magazine for July, 2005.