Sunday morning we took a road trip to see the Great Wall, China's obvious must see destination. As everyone knows, it's the longest wall in the world, and the largest man-made object in the world, stretching along China's barren, mountainous northern frontier for 4,000 miles. I think it ranks among the top couple of sights on everyone's wish list. Although the Chinese manage to take a fair amount of the joy out of the experience, it's still well worth the visit. But before I get to that, I have to say I really don't get the whole idea. First, China was for most of recorded history the world's most advanced/powerful/largest country, and certainly always dominated Asia. It's population is about one hundred times bigger than any of its neighbors (India was usually divided into about 1,000 kingdoms). Then, when you see the northern border, it's huge mountains all over that would seem to be impenetrable by any army. So if you already have a 100 to 1 advantage over your neighbors, and the benefit of an impenetrable mountain range, you'd have to be incredibly insecure to worry about invasions from the north. But the emperors spent enormous amounts of time and money on building and maintaining this thing, from the first wall at 200 BC until the most recent construction around 1400. And I don't understand the thinking that an enemy who was able to scale up these formidable mountains would be deterred by the additional six feet of wall at the summit. But what I really don't understand is that, despite the completely superfluous nature of the wall, it nevertheless didn't seem to deter any invaders. Both the Mongols and the Manchurians penetrated the wall and took over the whole kingdom, which would be analagous to Guatamela successfully invading the US. So yes, China was crazily insecure to think they'd ever need a wall, and the wall failed to stop their complete defeat by tiny border states, which isn't really consistent, but hence my confusion.