The Great Wall, also known as the Great Wall, was an ancient Chinese military defense fortification that built a tall, sturdy, and continuous wall to restrict the movement of enemy cavalry. The Great Wall is not an isolated city wall, but a complex of buildings composed of a city wall as the main body, combined with a large number of defense systems such as cities, barriers, pavilions, and signs.
The history of the construction of the Great Wall can be traced back to the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the famous quote 'Beacon Fire Plays Marquises' that occurred in the capital city of Haojing (now Xi'an, Shaanxi) originates from this. During the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period, various countries competed for hegemony and defended each other, and the construction of the Great Wall reached its first peak, but the length of the construction at that time was relatively short. After Qin conquered the six kingdoms and unified the world, Emperor Qin Shi Huang repaired and connected the Great Wall of the Warring States period, forming the scale of the Great Wall of Ten Thousand Li. The Ming Dynasty was the last dynasty to build the Great Wall on a large scale, and most of the well-known Great Wall was built during the Ming Dynasty.
The distribution of the Great Wall is mainly concentrated in 15 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the central government, including Hebei, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Shandong, Henan, Qinghai, Ningxia, and Xinjiang. Among them, the length of the Great Wall in Hebei Province exceeds 2000 kilometers, while the length of the Great Wall in Shaanxi Province is 1838 kilometers. According to the national survey of the Great Wall resources conducted by the cultural relics and surveying department, the total length of the Ming Great Wall is 8851.8 kilometers, while the length of the Qin Han and early Great Wall exceeds 10000 kilometers, with a total length of over 21000 kilometers. The existing cultural relics of the Great Wall include various sites such as the walls, trenches, boundary trenches, independent buildings, fortresses, and related facilities, totaling more than 43000 sites/sections.
On March 4, 1961, the Great Wall was announced by the State Council as one of the first batch of national key cultural relics protection units. In December 1987, the Great Wall was listed as a world cultural heritage site. On November 26, 2020, the National Cutural Heritage Administration released the first batch of national key sections of the Great Wall.