Ditches and walls have always been the first defensive measures adopted in response to environmental threats and human violence. In consonance with the Marxist dictum that civilization evolved from a matriarchal, egalitarian society through patriarchal-based structures and an inherent tendency to warfare, Chinese scholars have long claimed that the earliest Neolithic ditches were intended simply to prevent domesticated livestock from venturing forth and thwart incursions by wild animals. However, although they may have been minimally effective in achieving the former, the ditches would never have deterred agile predators from entering a settlement. Therefore, they must have performed a defensive function, one that was enabled by the raised profile of most early villages.
Many premodern civilizations fabricated highly formidable walls from readily available rocks and laboriously quarried stone blocks, but others resorted to more easily worked, though perishable, materials such as wood to erect functional barriers, ranging from hedgehogs and simple palisades through complex log fortresses. Those dwelling in environments bereft of readily accessible trees and stone were compelled to construct primitive earthworks, employ sun-dried mud blocks, or exploit the evolving technology of kiln-fired bricks. Although China was still heavily forested throughout the Neolithic period, the soil deposited in the alluvial plains, even the famous sticky “yellow earth” washed down by the Yellow River, lent itself far more easily to digging, carving,
and shaping with the basic tools of the time—axes, scrapers, and short shovels cobbled together by affixing appropriately shaped pieces of stone or bone to a wooden handle—than did hewing trees or chiseling stone from local outcroppings. Concerted pounding could compress and harden the soil to an almost concretelike substance roughly equivalent to sedimentary rock that would, with minimal maintenance, endure for millennia.
A number of strategically advantageous locations near rivers or amid mountains were continuously occupied from Neolithic times. As these settlements evolved into fortified towns in the Lungshan period and labor became available or the degree of threat increased, their massive walls were enlarged. Preexisting structures were generally reshaped and significantly augmented rather than simply rebuilt, often deliberately expanded out over the very ditches that had protected them. Many Shang sites subsequently served as the nucleus for resplendent cities when the early Chou established the fortified power centers that eventually evolved into heavily fortified Spring and Autumn and Warring States capitals.
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Unfortunately, despite their critical role in civilization’s evolution and impact on warfare, the history and technology of Chinese fortified settlements have yet to be systematically studied.
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Nevertheless, discoveries over the last several decades have pushed the defensive horizon well back into the Neolithic period, permitting a tentative recounting of the salient features within the context of China’s military history.
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However, contemplation of more profound questions, including whether increasingly urbanized, fortified sites stimulated warfare or simply reflected warfare’s increased scope and intensity, must be foregone.
Particularly in the earliest periods, when the populace was comparatively small and competition for land minimal, burgeoning groups invariably sought to exploit the terrain’s strategic advantages. Later ages might be able to employ vast labor resources to overcome natural obstacles and reshape the terrain’s configuration, but Neolithic groups had to choose their sites for their environmental benefits and protective features. Except for mountainside villages constructed in semiarid locations, migrant settlers seeking well-watered areas generally established their communities alongside marshes, lakes, ponds, streams, and rivers.
The many early towns that were not abandoned despite suffering extensive flood damage show the overwhelming importance of immediate proximity to active water sources.
Still bodies of water may have presented little flood risk, but the danger of being inundated by a sudden increase in the volume of an adjacent river or stream prompted the implementation of basic protective measures. Insofar as embankment building and preventative channeling did not begin until well after the technology of rammed earth had been reasonably perfected, the sole options were choosing somewhat raised terrain, especially natural terraces, or artificially increasing the village’s overall height to produce a sort of mound settlement, the precursor of the platform city.
Cognizant of water’s effectiveness as a defensive barrier, settlement planners—there is considerable evidence that even early settlements were built according to design rather than haphazardly evolved—frequently chose sites amid multiple bodies of water. Many early towns were surprisingly positioned within the confluence of two or three rivers or between a river and nearby lake or marsh rather than simply above or along the outer bank of a single river, despite the high flood risk and the inconvenience of having to cross these watercourses on a daily basis.
CHARACTER AND FUNCTION OF EARLY WALLS
Even in the Lungshan period (3,000 to 2,000 BCE) immediately prior to the Hsia dynasty, Chinese walls had already reached astonishing dimensions and sometimes exceeded twenty-five meters (eighty-one feet) in width. Constructing these fortifications must have required a Herculean expenditure of energy that inflicted intense misery on the workers, yet the motive for their massiveness remains unknown. Later periods would exploit the resulting top surfaces to deploy contingents of soldiers, set up countersiege engines or large trebuchets, and erect low protective walls or crenellations for archers and crossbowmen. However, combatants in the Yangshao, Lungshan, and Shang lacked large defensive devices, employed very limited infantry forces, and didn’t otherwise require a large platform to repel attackers because city assaults were rarely undertaken, making the ranks to the rear largely ineffective.
Because these ancient peoples never built watchtowers or constructed bow emplacements on top of these ancient walls except possibly above a few gates, another justification for their inordinately great width must be sought.
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One commonly advanced explanation claims that this massiveness was required to withstand the scouring effects and relentless pressure that might be exerted by nearby creeks and rivers, that only substantial walls and deliberately emplaced dikes could prevent the disastrous inundations that plagued settlements along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, as well as their more vigorous tributaries, throughout Chinese history.
Despite the assertion frequently seen in the later military writings that “in walls, massiveness is best,” this explanation remains inadequate for several reasons. First, many cities protected by imposing walls were located far from problematic rivers and streams. Second, height rather than width has always proven the most formidable psychological deterrent and greatest physical obstacle to external forces, yet China’s walls were almost invariably more expansive than necessary to sustain their height. Third, the problem of erosion could be solved in part by facing the exterior portion with smaller rocks, overlaying exposed surfaces with hardened clay, constructing stone knee walls, or encapsulating the earthen core in stone or brick, as witnessed from the Han onward. Truly thick walls would only become necessary in the Spring and Autumn period, when aquatic warfare commenced and powerful assaults effected by damming rivers and diverting mountain streams could not be withstood without this massiveness.
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Nevertheless, indestructible bulk creates a sense of awesomeness, and insurmountable fortifications foster a sense of security. Apart from functioning as a military bastion and serving as a refuge against such natural onslaughts as typhoons, walls define communities and nurture a sense of uniqueness by physically isolating the members of the settlement. Western psychoanalytic literature has long pondered the significance of this inclusiveness and the symbolic sense of sanctuary that walls can create, and popular analysis continues to attribute China’s ethnocentric tendencies (or supposed “citadel mentality”) to their deliberate employment over the millennia, including to segregate the much-denigrated “barbarians.” Compelling the populace to engage in organized wall building would have enhanced this sense of common
identity while presumably solidifying the chief’s authority and absorbing excess disruptive energy.
Whatever the validity of these insights, it should be remembered that geopolitically defined states did not appear prior to the late Western Chou. Walls were first constructed around villages and towns, then tentatively between states to demark borders as much as thwart incursions, and only late in the Warring States period between so-called sedentary China and the nomadic steppe peoples. Internal compartmentalization slowly developed in late Lungshan cities, then accelerated dramatically in the Shang and thereafter, increasingly segregating the royal quarters from the privileged populace, defining the artisanal sectors, and segmenting the residential and industrial areas into smaller and smaller units, ostensibly for defense but more often to prevent people from moving about freely and to thwart evildoers. Apart from impeding external intrusions, the walls came to be deemed an essential measure for regulating the populace, controlling their activities, and managing intercourse with the outer world, functions that they inherently performed from inception even in the absence of explicit theorizing.
More important, rather than just preserving the inhabitants and their property, walls provided the means to protect military forces, project power, and control the countryside. Prior to the advent of cannon and explosives, fortified walls constituted tremendous combat multipliers in early China because they allowed small but determined garrisons to successfully withstand virtual hordes of aggressors. Accordingly, in a much misunderstood and frequently misquoted statement, Sun-tzu condemned wasteful assaults on fortresses as the lowest possible tactic and incisively postulated that even minimal forces ensconced in a defensive posture would prove more than adequate. Fortifications could thus be exploited to maximize the value of limited power rather than simply provide a place of refuge in times of weakness and necessity.
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The growth of settlements, largely synonymous with the evolution of civilization in ancient China, fundamentally affected the history of warfare. As populations increased, class differentiation arose, and ruling elites emerged, a few developed into sizable military and administrative centers. Material wealth began to accumulate in them; ceramic, bronze, and other early craft industries developed in their immediate environs;
significant surpluses produced by the burgeoning agricultural sector were stored within them; and they became centers for consumption. Even if (as vociferously claimed) their growth was power based rather than economically derived, rudimentary trading practices also appeared that further stimulated the evolution of certain fortified towns into regional centers as well as highly desirable military targets.
The nature of warfare in the Neolithic remains unknown, but based on Shang tactical practices and the lack of destructive evidence at the sites so far investigated, it can be concluded that these massive fortifications proved effective in deterring attacks. Rather than seeking to conquer and annex them, chieftains in search of the spoils necessary for self-aggrandizement and motivating their followers targeted contiguous areas and unprotected settlements. Extensive grain pits discovered at Wu-an Ts’u-shan dating to the second half of the sixth millennium BCE, which still held the equivalent of some fifty metric tons of millet, provide incontrovertible evidence of agriculture’s ever-increasing productivity and that Neolithic settlements were already generating astonishing grain surpluses, one of the foundations of power and vitality in ancient China.
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Although ditches, then walls, developed in accord with the rise of agriculture and animal husbandry, other factors apparently stimulated their comparatively rapid evolution, including environmental degradation, climatic changes, population increases, and the ever-intensifying struggle for edible natural resources and wild animals in the less fertile and more arid areas. A significant shift to a threat-dominated context is generally envisioned as having occurred during the transitional early Lungshan period. However, the recent discovery of astonishingly early Neolithic defensive measures and numerous studies of ancient weapons and skeletons that predate this demarcation indicate China had a long heritage of violence that may well have commenced with its famous Beijing Man.
The oldest presently known Chinese settlements, mostly scattered individual hamlets, date back prior to the Neolithic Age that commenced in parts of China by approximately 10,000 BCE.
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For the next 3,000 years primitive yet constantly evolving agricultural practices spawned slowly growing settlements that were generally concentrated near rivers and accessible marshes. Unsurprisingly, so-called Hua-Hsia
or Chinese civilization thus developed primarily (but not exclusively) in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, both well-watered areas with soft, alluvial soil.
Although barter and other forms of minimal interaction within a day’s walking distance seem to have occurred with the inception of these settlements, life in that era of “ten thousand villages” probably differed little from the
Tao Te Ching’s
idealized depiction:
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Although neighboring states look across at each other,
And the sounds of roosters and dogs be mutually heard,
Unto old age and death, the people do not travel back and forth.
The earliest among the several sites that have been at least minimally excavated and radiocarbon dated is Nan-kuang-t’ou at Hsü-shui in Hebei, which flourished in the ninth or eighth millennium BCE.
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Next in succession appears to be the P’eng-t’ou-shan cultural site on the plains just north of the Li River in Hunan, essentially located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze river basin. Although dates stretching from 7800 to 5795 BCE have been suggested for this site, it was probably occupied from 6900 to 6300 BCE.
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This settlement is particularly important for the history of Chinese warfare because it was already protected by a circular ditch, and the dwellings, which average some thirty square meters and are much larger than formerly, were probably intended for extended family use.
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Moreover, the benefits of rice cultivation were already evident, satisfying one of the oft-stated conditions for true warfare.