Name: The Han Dynasty's Great Wall | Ancient China from Above
Uploaded: 2020-11-01T18:26:35.000Z
Duration: 5 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The temperatures are literally below freezing.

It's a hell of a place to imagine finding archeology.

Sarah's guiding me to faint traces of what

If I get up here, I think I can get my first glimpse.

Here, in the middle of nowhere, a stretch of ancient wall.

And it looks very different from anything I've seen so far.

This is a very distinctive kind of material.

We have rammed earth, packed down, with a reed foundation.

pressed in there to serve as a foundation

of building even with the desert's loose sand and gravel.

But if the Ming didn't build this, then who did?

To find out, I'm meeting Jang Joon Min, the head of a team

from the Gansu Institute of Relics and Archaeology,

TRANSLATOR: These are two arrowheads we found nearby.

I've never seen this shape to an arrowhead before.

You know, where it's basically three-sided like this.

TRANSLATOR: We found lots of these along the wall

These arrowheads are very typical of the Han Dynasty.

1,500 years before the Ming, before the Roman Empire formed

in the West and Cleopatra ruled Ancient Egypt,

They oversaw a golden age of art, culture,

These tiny arrowheads reveal something momentous--

that the wall here is more than 2,000 years old.

It's an even earlier Great Wall of China that once

was simply built right on top 1,500 years later.

Battered by desert winds for over two millennia, what

remains of this ancient stretch of Great Wall

are just fragments of what was once a mighty barrier.

It's kind of hard, just looking at these ruined sections

of the wall, to get a sense of what it looked like originally.

So using historical sources and archaeological evidence,

I can only imagine being part of an invading nomad army,

and coming up against this wall, and thinking,

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The Han Dynasty's Great Wall | Ancient China from Above

literally

enormous

material

reveal