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Facts, sourced

A short list, each one tied to a page we have on file. Longer arguments live on the many-walls, stretches and myths pages.

• Encyclopaedia Britannica says the Great Wall actually consists of numerous walls — many of them parallel to each other — built over some two millennia across northern China and southern Mongolia. [Britannica]
• UNESCO’s official short description says that in about 220 B.C., under Qin Shi Huang, sections of earlier fortifications were joined together to form a united defence system against invasions from the north. [UNESCO]
• Britannica dates the Qin period of construction to about 214 BCE, lasting a decade, and says hundreds of thousands of soldiers and conscripted workers laboured on the project. [Britannica]
• The same official text says construction continued up to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), when the Great Wall became the world’s largest military structure. [UNESCO]
• UNESCO’s Statement of Outstanding Universal Value gives the Great Wall a total length of more than 20,000 kilometres, built from the 3rd century BC to the 17th century AD as the military defence project of successive Chinese empires. [UNESCO]
• Britannica’s “Top Questions” answer gives the total length of all sections ever built as about 21,196 kilometres (13,171 miles), including overlapping sections that were rebuilt, and the Ming wall as about 8,850 kilometres (5,499 miles). [Britannica]
• A UNESCO periodic report on the property gives the Ming Great Wall as 8,851.8 km, and gives the Great Wall of the Qin, Han and other dynasties as a separate figure. [UNESCO]
• About one-fourth of that Ming length, Britannica says, consists solely of natural barriers such as rivers and mountain ridges; about 70 percent is actual constructed wall, and the small remaining stretches are ditches or moats. [Britannica]
• That statement says the Great Wall begins in the east at Shanhaiguan in Hebei province and ends at Jiayuguan in Gansu province to the west. [UNESCO]
• Traditionally, Britannica says, the eastern terminus of the wall was considered to be Shanhai Pass (Shanhaiguan) in eastern Hebei, on the coast of the Bo Hai; later government-sponsored investigations revealed sections of wall in Liaoning, and the greater total length of the Ming wall was announced in 2009. [Britannica]
• UNESCO illustrates the wall’s testimony to ancient Chinese civilisations by the rammed-earth sections of Western Han fortifications conserved in Gansu, as well as by the masonry of the Ming period. [UNESCO]
• Its main body, UNESCO says, consists of walls, horse tracks, watch towers and shelters on the wall, and includes fortresses and passes along the Wall. [UNESCO]
• The Great Wall was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1987, under criteria (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and (vi). [UNESCO]
• The BBC notes that the Great Wall was listed as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1987. [BBC News]
• Britannica records that the Great Wall was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987. [Britannica]
• UNESCO records that the visual integrity of the Wall at Badaling has been impacted negatively by construction of tourist facilities and a cable car. [UNESCO]
• On 6 June 2012 the BBC, reporting state media, wrote that the wall measures 21,196.18 km (about 13,170.7 miles) based on the latest state survey results, as reported by the news agency Xinhua. [BBC News]
• Tong Mingkang, deputy chief, said the survey revealed a total of 43,721 heritage sites that included stretches of the Great Wall, the BBC reported, citing Xinhua. [BBC News]
• NASA’s 2005 feature “China’s Wall Less Great in View from Space” calls the idea a space-based myth: the Great Wall, frequently billed as the only man-made object visible from space, generally isn’t, at least to the unaided eye in low Earth orbit, and it certainly isn’t visible from the Moon. [NASA]
• Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean is quoted: “The only thing you can see from the Moon is a beautiful sphere, mostly white, some blue and patches of yellow, and every once in a while some green vegetation. No man-made object is visible at this scale.” [NASA]
• Asked whether you can see the Great Wall from space, Britannica answers that you typically can’t: astronauts stated it was not visible with the naked eye from the Moon, and that the structure is only sometimes visible from low orbit and the International Space Station. [Britannica]