The month-long 2010 World Cup “destroys” my routine life. But one thing I still keep on doing is reading. I’ve been reading a 410-page novel “The Great Wall” written by John Man. He is a great storyteller as well as a historian.
John Man is an expert on the Great Wall of China and Mongolia. He travelled the Wall from the far western deserts to the Pacific, exploring the grandest sections and many “wild” ones.
He says that the Wall is not an “it”. It’s a “them”, walls in the plural, and they do not form a continuous line. They are in bits, which appear on good maps like fragments of DNA in a scientific diagram.
His idea about the making of the Great Wall of China is quite different from those presented by the official documents or from other experts on the Wall. Reading the novel gives you much new thinking about the wall or the walls.
