BEJING, CHINA: 700-km-long Additional Section of The Great Wall found in China

Great Wall of China at Badaling (image: Samxli via creative commons)

February 11, 3:15 AM

By Will Hunt

The Great Wall of China may be visible from outer space, but that doesn't mean it's easy to keep track of. The China Daily newspaper reported yesterday that archaeologists have discovered over 700 km of previously undetected sections of the wall in the Gansu and Shanxi regions of northwest of China. So we can tack on those 700 km to the previous length of 8,852 km, giving us a mind-boggling figure roughly equal to the distance between London and Tokyo. 

Of course, the 'Great Wall,' in singular form, is something of a misnomer. What we refer to as the Great Wall is, in fact, not a single wall stretching in a continuous chain, but a series of walls, built piecemeal across history between the 5th century BC and 16th century. As the map below shows, these walls are built near each other but are mostly disconnected. 

Map of the Great Wall of China (image: wikimedia commons) (For a blow-up version of the map, click here).

Liu Yulin, an archaeologist from the Jinta Museum, and his colleagues discovered this section of the wall while working on a nation-wide survey of cultural relics, which began in 2007 and will end in December of 2011. His colleagues found chunks of the wall in remote, uninhabited sections of the Gobi Desert.

"As the ancient buildings were built in the remote mountainous and desert areas, the remains of the wall were well protected without being destroyed by human activities. They were only partly destroyed by flood and sandstorm," Liu told China Daily.

According to reports, 26 kilometers of the wall were found in the Jinta (Gansu) province. Dating back to the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC - 24 AD), this section has been called by surveyors one of the best preserved in the country. Another roughly 700 km of walls were found in the Shanxi province, with these sections being built in the Qin (221-206 BC), Western Han and Sui (581-618 BC) dynasties.

While stumbling upon 700 km of a monumental wall sounds like a rather uncanny discovery, the find is less unique than you might think. Just last September, surveyors found another previously uncharted section of the wall, this one reaching 11 km eastward in the northeastern province of Jilin. It appears the Great Wall, which was originally built to protect against invading barbarians from the north, has more secrets to reveal.

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