The Great Wall
This is a 50-minute video made for television on the Great Wall. It offers the nitty-gritty of the Great Wall in fact, fiction, history, mysticism, etc. This is a feature video that will have limited utility in the classroom as a whole, but might be useful shown in shorter clips.
What is most objectionable about this video is its attempt to present China as something wholly other--mysterious and magical. Some examples: [China is] "a culture that prizes the practical and magical" and "The Great Wall twists and turns, stops and starts, sometimes for no apparent reason," and following Morris Rossabi's comment that Chinese are wary of opening the Qin tomb because it is reported to have booby traps set, the narrator states, "Maybe the Chinese are concerned about booby traps or maybe [ominous music in background] they are worried about unseen spirits....
In addition to this offensive underlying premise, the narrator's pronunciation of Chinese words ranges from poor to adequate.
On the other more positive side, the video, as would be expected of a feature made for television, has sharp, colorful and interesting footage. It is historically accurate in relating the history of the Wall and the Qin Dynasty. The footage of the wall and of actors portraying Qin Dynasty characters is interspersed with the "talking heads" of some of the most well-known scholars worldwide on the Great Wall: Arthur Waldron of the Naval War College; Morris Rossabi of City University of New York; Nicola DiCosmo of Harvard; Robin Yates of McGill; Robin Handbury-Tenison of Cornwall, England; Louella Handbury-Tenison of Cornwall, England; and Micael Nylan of Princeton.
The video content describes the following:
- the Wall in fact and fiction
- the Qin Emperor and the contributions of his empire to the Wall and to Chinese civilization in general
- the later Mongol invasions into China from beyond the Wall
- the Ming Dynasty rebuilding of the Wall
- the destruction wrought by Japan and Chairman Mao, and
- the Wall as a national symbol.
