China: 'On New Year's Day, 2 February 1421, after 16 years of dedicated construction by more than 200,000 labourers, the Ming emperor Yongle inaugurated his new capital, Beijing, on the site of the former Mongol city of Dadu." With this one sentence, Julia Lovell, in her book, The Great Wall, pinpoints a decisive moment in the history of a giant country whose push/pull relationship with western Europe continues to this day.
Surrounding the new capital was a wall 23 kilometres in length and 10 metres in height. Within it, sitting tight - for the duration - was the Forbidden City.
Wall-building is a Chinese thing but the Long Wall - as the Great Wall was known at first - was built over the centuries as an often disconnected series of sand ramparts, dykes and stone constructions, each reflecting China's state of superiority or unease in relation to the rest of the world.
The country's enormous size made it difficult to defend and one of the first walls built was in 400BC to protect the northern frontiers. Over the next 600 years, the wall, in its various incarnations, stretched right across northern China, stopping only at the Taklamakan Desert where the Jade Gate led to India and the Silk Road, the trade along which opened the country to the outside world. Caravans passed to and fro through the Jade Gate bringing gold, ivory, glass, cinnamon, rhubarb, silk - and Buddhism.
China's Great Wall is often presented as a protective device, keeping out the barbarians - which included marauding Europeans - but Julia Lovell underlines also the imperialist aspect of aggrandising wall-building, drawing a parallel between the Great Wall of China and the massive wall of sand built by Morocco in Western Sahara as well as the Israeli one, now nearing completion, in parts of the West Bank.
But if the Chinese were worried about the barbarians, they had a case. The Jesuits arrived in great numbers looking for souls to save - Catholic expansionism, as the writer puts it - while adventurers came looking for artefacts. "In the winter of 1900-1901, Stein had made his first raid into the Taklamakan," she writes. This was the Anglo-Hungarian explorer, Aurel Stein, who purchased 1,000-year-old books, silk paintings and manuscripts, paying the equivalent of €185 for the job lot.
He was rewarded with a knighthood for services rendered to the British Museum, though in China he was "excoriated as an imperialist cave-robber".
This is not a book only about the Great Wall, for through its pages walk the people of China. We meet Genghis Khan, left as a child to forage for wayside food when the clan abandons his fatherless family. There is the Mongolian leader, Maodan, who, in old age and wanting to secure his territory, proposes marriage to the Chinese empress. Her advisers suggest she modify her fury and, in her rejection, stick to the facts: "My age is advanced," she therefore replies, "and my vitality is weakening. Both my hair and my teeth are falling out and I cannot even walk steadily."
For Lovell, the present-day wall is personified by the internet, a vehicle of communication which the government seeks to control. However, even a firewall of enormous proportions has its loopholes through which dissidents or clever surfers can pass.
This is a book that should be read by anyone seeking an extensive overview of China's story. It may also serve as a warning to entrepreneurs motivated by what Lovell calls the "profit-hungry European impulse to trade". China, she reminds us, has been at it a great deal longer.
CHINESE WRITER SUN SHUYUN, choosing another seminal period in her country's history, writes movingly about the men and women who undertook - not always willingly - the Long March, an exercise engineered or inspired by, according to your political views, Mao Zedong, a leading figure in the fledgling Communist Party. The march was, in fact, a retreat from the well-armed Nationalists and began in Judu in the south-east tip of China and ended, after many tortuous deviations, in Wugi in the north-east province of Shaanxi. Of the 200,000 who set out in 1934, only one-fifth survived the 8,000km mountainous trek. Of these, 500 are still alive and Sun Shuyun, now in her 40s, managed to interview some of the survivors who, in their 80s and 90s, are, by definition, still energetic in mind and body. As part of the exercise, the writer retraced the steps of these stalwarts, travelling in the relative comfort of bus and car, though sometimes, she tells us maybe a little too excitedly, walking up to 15km a day.
Some have a sorry tale to tell. Mao's wife was forced to leave behind her newborn baby as the crying might have alerted the enemy. Fourteen-year-old Sangluo was forced to join the march and then abandoned in faraway Tibet because a foot injury prevented him from walking. He married a Tibetan woman, acted as village accountant for 30 years and now tends his yak when his arthritis allows.
Because her feet are so close to the ground, physically and metaphorically, Sun Shuyun evokes the Chinese landscape in small but acute images: the temple bell hanging from a camphor tree, bamboo torches lighting up the gate to a shrine, the 12 men needed to carry the printing press which Mao insisted be taken on the march. Her book is dedicated to "all the men and women on the Long March". And rightly so.
Mary Russell is a writer with a special interest in travel
The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000BC-AD2000 By Julia Lovell. Atlantic Books, 412pp. £19.99
The Long March By Sun Shuyun. Harper Press, 302pp. £20