In one of his Odes, the Roman poet Horace portrays Maecenas, Roman statesman, as wondering what the Chinese were up to. Horace lived in the first century BCE. He was exaggerating when he wrote that; he was trying to please his patron by depicting him as someone whose concerns extended far and wide. But, with hindsight today, we can say that Horace’s line was not sheer hollow flattery. Some 200 years before Horace, Shih Huang-ti, who was called – or called himself – ‘the First Emperor of China,’ employed 700,000 labourers to build the humungous Great Wall of China by linking the many existing fortifications. He also constructed a huge network of roads and canals paving the material foundations of a great civilisation. Shih Huang-ti was a barbarian conqueror, however. He was illiterate and was despised by his literate subjects. His dynasty failed eventually. His renown became equivocal. But the Great Wall caused him to be r...
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