The Great Wall of China question???myth?

Question

I was just wondering...

is it REALLY true that some workers that worked on the Great Wall of China were actually part of the wall structure becuase they died on it?

and the other workers just put the corpses into the wall???

Answer 1

I can't say for sure because I wasn't there, and it was a long time ago. But I really seriously doubt it.  If you look at the wall, it is made of blocks.  I read somewhere they are blocks of compressed earth, but they could be low-fired bricks.  Anyway, if the wall is solid bricks, where would they put the bodies?  They'd have to cut them up or something and put the pieces in the mortar.  None of the wall is concrete or filled with concrete, which is where you'd hide bodies.

This same myth is told about the Hoover Dam.  I toured Hoover Dam some years ago, and unlike the wall, the Hoover Dam is almost 100% cast concrete, which could hide a body.  The tour guide addressed this myth even though nobody asked about it.  He said the dam was divided into several hundred sections which were poured in order, one load at a time.  One load was between 4 and 6 inches of concrete, so its not very likely anyone got trapped beneath a pour.  Several men died while building the dam, all from falls.  (BTW did you know the hard hat was invented during the construction of the Hoover Dam?)

BTW it is also a myth that the Chinese Wall can be seen from space. 8^<

Answer 2

Unfortunately true

Answer 3

yes it is true. the conditions that the great wall made it difficult to survive especially because it is 4000 miles long making it inevitable that people died on it and built right into the wall.

Answer 4

according to all historical accounts, yes.

Answer 5

That "myth" is 100% true.  There were hundreds of workers who's bodies were placed in the wall.  They were so determined and in a time crisis to get it finished that they would just pick up the bodies, place them in the wall and keep working.  It is also true that you can see The Great Wall from space.

Answer 6

yes. When they were building the wall they started to run low on materials, as you can imagine, so they just put the bodies in. It was also more cost effective than having to transport the bodies outof the area.  

Answer 7

No, workers were not built into the wall itself. There may well have been some that were buried in the earth-fill, and there thousands buried along the wall, but human bodies make very poor building material and would not have been used to build the wall itself.

As for the myth about seeing the Great Wall from space, absolutely untrue. For proof, see if you find a single satellite image on the site below on which you can actually see the wall. And, keep in mind that this website features pictures taken by a very high resolution satellite.

Answer 8

Hard to say.  The proof would be, finding walled up skeletons, wouldn't it?  I have heard no report any have been found, but perhaps that's not surprising.  The original Great Wall was built of pounded earth.  It wasn't faced with brick in the areas north of Peking till the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

Have you noticed that all the pictures of the Wall show the same stretch?  I suspect that the rest is much more fragmentary.

Answer 9

yes its true