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Four years ago I stood on the Great Wall of China at its eastern most point at Shanhaiguan and learned a lot about walls in just a few moments. I learned that the backbone of an empire can be created by a wall, but that the same creation can destroy everything that the wall was ever meant to stand for. As I looked out at the Bohai Sea from "The Old Dragon's Head" in Shanhaiguan I listened to drums beaten by local performers and saw how the wall disappeared into the sea from the final guard tower on the largest man-made structure in the world. I learned that to have been a soldier hearing those drums as a warning during the Ming Dynasty must have been to look out toward the Bohai Sea and know that absolutely nothing out there was friendly. To the north waited death at the hands of three separate armies, each bent on your destruction because beneath your feet was the key to the Chinese heartland. Toward Beijing lay disappointment since the only thing less reliable than the sea were supplies. Yes, to guard the gate in Shanhaiguan must have been a lonely thing with water on one side and plentiful enemies all around. There must have been very little hope in what was then a conscripted army, and yet the real lesson Shanhaiguan teaches about China is of the fall of all empires, that lesson being that centuries of culture can end because of a greedy traitor, a grass roots rebel from the heartland, and a woman.

Legend has it that the length of the section of wall that extends into the Bohai sea was determined by a the great Ming general Qi Jiguang in the early 1500's when he ordered one of his mounted cavalrymen to ride his horse as far out to sea as the horse would swim. Both horse and rider perished in the process, adding one final note of death to a structure that had already claimed millions. It seems no surprise that even this last little bit of wall would be measured in blood. The pass at Shanhaiguan (literally translated as "Mountain and Ocean Pass") does not seem to be an important place by the look of it today. Sections of the wall in Beijing and Xian are much better restored and tended with more fanfare than the relatively small walled city of Shanhaiguan that measures a mere four kilometers square. The Forbidden City is as impressive a landmark as the Roman Coliseum and the Terra Cotta Warriors in Xian rival the Lourve in Paris for artistic expression on a mass scale, yet China is full of the undiscovered and under appreciated. If it hadn't been for two men and a woman whose fates intertwined at this particularly small outpost in modern day Hebei Province, China, and therefore Asia and the world, would most likely be very different today. The drama that unfolded in Shanhaiguan knows perhaps only the Trojan War as a rival in significance. Yet while this story also involves a dispute over a woman and a great general's hatred of his commander, the entire world of 1200 BC contained no more than an estimated fifty million people. Furthermore, after victory, the Mycenaean civilization was quickly defeated by the Dorians and their culture lost. In China in 1644, the actions of two men and a concubine would immediately change the lives of over two hundred million Chinese people and put them under foreign occupation for the next three hundred years.

Toward the end of the Ming Empire the ruling class had fallen into the trap most often tripped by complacency and the general assurance that things would remain "Ming" forever. After all, the empire had achieved the longest period of social harmony in human history and had successfully either bought off or married into the families of all its major competitors. By 1630 the dynasty was in the grip of corruption, the people were hungry, and that year in present day Yan'an a young sheep herder and wine merchant named Li Zheng was shackled in the town square for failure to repay loans to a local magistrate. This punishment was commonplace in a corrupt and bloated government, but it's a testament to the Chinese heart that it was the act of the magistrate striking a soldier across the face for offering Li shade that caused the people to break Li's bonds and take him off to the mountains. Around this time in modern Shaanxi, a famine had struck and the famous pseudo-socialist agricultural policies of the Ming were abandoned in favor of saving the ruling classes at the expense of the peasant class, which drove more than 20,000 followers to Li's camp. Li crowned himself the "roaming king", eventually sacking Beijing in April of 1644, and declaring himself Emperor of the Shun Dynasty.

Now that the seemingly impregnable lore and power of the Ming had been defeated, a massively powerful Ming General in Shanhaiguan named Wu Sangu saw his long awaited opportunity to take the throne himself. Due to the continuous Qing threat in Manchuria, Wu commanded over 50,000 men at the time. When he heard about Li's threat to Beijing, Wu began marching towards the capital. When he heard that Li had already taken Beijing he stopped half was and returned to his stronghold in Shanhaiguan. Li, sensing Wu's threat, sent eight thousand men and former Ming General Tang Tung along with several tons of silver taels to buy Wu off. It worked. Wu handed over Shanhaiguan, and therefore China, to General Tang and began marching toward Beijing to meet Li. Again halfway to Beijing, Wu got word that his wife Chen Yuanyuan had been taken by one of Li's generals. Chen Yuanyuan was not only considered one of the most beautiful women in imperial China, but also the great love of Wu's life who had been given to him by the former emperor as a wife yet held hostage in the Forbidden City as insurance that Wu would not revolt against the crown. When he heard that his wife had been taken, Wu turned his men around and destroyed the forces of Tang which were now controlling Shanhaiguan. Once Li heard about the massacre of Tang's forces he decided that he himself would attack the outpost and route Wu. Knowing that he had no chance against Li's superior numbers, Wu turned to a former enemy for help, the Qing leader Dorgon who himself had been amassing soldiers for an eventual attempt at the throne of China.

Li arrived on April 19th, 1644 with his vast army and began his campaign, going so far as to force Wu's own father to ask for his son's surrender. Also, according to folk tale and modern soap operas, Li held Chen Yuanyuan as prisoner under the threat of death should Wu not surrender. When this didn't work, Li surrounded the walled enclave and inflicted thousands of casualties. The first day of battle went to Li and it looked as though all was lost. On the second day though, Dorgon arrived just a few kilometers away from the pass with over eighty thousand men, easily destroying the remnants of Tang's forces, thereby exposing the north end of the pass and Li's left flank. Instead of coming to Wu's aide, Dorgon and the other Manchu princes sat back and watched from Weiyuan City (a ten minute bus ride from present day Shanhaiguan) as Wu's forces were pummeled in two days of bloody battle. Taking this inaction as a signal that the Manchu would not invade until the battle was over, Li sent everything he had against Wu who replied in kind and eventually lost yet another day. That night, Wu snuck out of the city through the heavily guarded pass, and met with Dorgon. During the meeting Wu knelt at the feet of the king and shaved his head to signal that he was now a Manchu officer rather than the potential emperor he had thought himself to be. The next day, just as the gates of the city fell to Li and Wu's forces were being routed, Wu sent a signal to Dorgon who unleashed sixty thousand men into the open pass, slaughtering Li's surprised forces and causing the "roaming king" to turn tail for Beijing. Just before his retreat, Li murdered Wu's father as revenge for his son's treachery but left Chen Yuanyuan alive, possibly realizing that her beauty alone had been enough to destroy him. Upon his return to Beijing on April 29th, Li held his imperial coronation ceremony and the next day fled to the heartland of Shaanxi as both Dorgon and Wu's forces approached the capital. For all his strength and prestige, Li's entire rule of China lasted only one day, undone in the end by a concubine that he himself had never touched. Over the coming years Li would wage a losing campaign against the Qing, ultimately dying at age forty either by murder or suicide. Many hold that the "roaming king" became a monk and disappeared into a Buddhist life of poverty.

General Wu went on to fight the remnants of the Ming and was eventually made Yixing Wang or "King with a different surname than that of the emperor" in Yunan province. Wu was never trusted by the Qing, but he was propped up as king of a small fief since the Qing were faced with the huge problem of controlling the enormous Han Chinese population as they themselves were an ethnic minority in the country. Wu eventually turned on the Qing, declaring himself emperor of the Zhou. He died of natural causes in 1678, and lives in history as a traitor.

Standing there on the wall four years ago, I recounted the history of Shanhaiguan and realized that the Great Wall of China is both a uniting symbol as well as a rock that many Chinese leaders have broken themselves against. While the wall offered protection through the millennia, it also cut a stark line between what was Chinese and what wasn't. By labeling the Shanhaiguan pass "The First Pass Under Heaven", the Ming drew one of many stark and imagined contrasts between themselves and what they saw as "barbarians" from anywhere else. As the sea crashed against the newly remodeled wall, this one meant to attract tourist dollars, I realized that the act of building a wall to separate the Han from the Manchu had made both races fundamentally different, and therefore when the forces of greed, treachery, and love proved too great for the wall, the bloody meeting of these two races was to ultimately change the face of the world. If Wu Sangui had surrendered to Li instead of joining with the Qing, Li would have most likely held onto the throne to become a fairly powerful emperor who was of home grown ethnicity. His legend as a reformer of the despotic Ming system would have spread across China and when the famine abated he would have probably kept China in the hands of the Han as the Manchu remained north of the wall. Because of his love of Chen Yuanyuan, Wu shaved his head and placed China under the yolk of foreign rule for the next three hundred years, thereby causing most Chinese people to associate any form of imperialism with a kind of social slavery. Many believe that if the Qing had not conquered China and created this hatred of government, the rise of Communism would not have had as great a chance. It seems no surprise that Mao Zedong's first act of rebellion in his life was to hold down his middle school classmates and shave their queue, what he and most Chinese saw as a symbol of foreign occupation.

To visit Shanhaiguan is to visit one of the relatively unknown corners of the world where events controlled by the human heart rather than the human mind destroyed one of the greatest things of man. In the temple of the famous Buddhist deity Guanyin just near "The Old Dragon's Head", the smell of incense is thick and the face of Guanyin looks out to sea with a wise and matronly smile, as though having known all along that a wall can keep a lot of things out, but eventually the fear and avarice which built it will throw open its gates.