HAIZIGOU, China — Zhang Lingmian was collecting walnuts in the countryside north of Beijing last autumn when a friend from a nearby village mentioned a mysterious structure in the mountains that had stumped locals.
The retired cultural heritage official and his friend scampered uphill for two hours, whacking their way through the brambles after the path ran out. At the top of a 2,700-foot-high ridge, they reached a long trail of haphazardly placed rocks.
Zhang says he immediately recognized what villagers called “the strange stones.”
“I knew right away it had to be part of the Great Wall of China,” Zhang recalled on a recent hike to show off his discovery about 50 miles from central Beijing.
Although most of the rocks had tumbled down, a few piles reached up to Zhang’s chest. “The walls just had to be high enough to keep the barbarians from crossing with their horses,” explained Zhang, who says he has studied the wall for 33 years.
The Great Wall of China, one of the most recognizable structures on earth, continues to reveal new layers of itself - to cries of disbelief and fury in some quarters. At a time when Beijing is asserting its territorial borders in the South China Sea, the discoveries are not universally applauded.
In early June, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage announced it now believes the Great Wall is 13,171 miles long, if you put all of the discovered portions end to end. That’s more than half the circumference of the globe, four times the span of the United States coast to coast and nearly 2 1/2 times the estimated length in a preliminary report released in 2009, two years into a project in which the Chinese measured it for the first time.
To the extent that the Great Wall is a symbol of China, a bigger wall means a bigger China - if only symbolically.
“I’m very suspicious. China wants to rewrite history to make sure history conforms with the borders of today’s China,” said Stephane Mot, a former French diplomat and a blogger based in Seoul, who has accused the Chinese archaeologists of obliterating Korean culture.
Traditionally, the Great Wall was thought to extend from Jiayuguan, a desert oasis 1,000 miles west of Beijing, to Shanhaiguan, 190 miles east of the capital, on the Bohai Sea. In 2001, Chinese archaeologists announced that the wall extended deep into Xinjiang, the northwestern region claimed by the minority Uighurs as their homeland; last month’s announcement sent the eastern bounds of the wall to the North Korean border.
That has angered Koreans, who say the relics were built by ancient Koreans of the Koguryo kingdom, which occupied much of modern-day Manchuria from 37 BC to AD 688.
“This is a distortion. The Chinese are using the wall to wipe out the Korean legacy, the same as they are doing with the Uighurs and Tibetans,” said Seo Sang-mun, a military historian with Seoul based Chung-Ang University.
Chinese defend the new measurements.
“I would say that these are not necessarily ‘new discoveries.’ Rather, we are looking more carefully at what is on the ground and trying to clarify whether it is the Great Wall or not,” said Yan Jianmin, office director of the China Great Wall Society, a nongovernmental organization of scholars and wall enthusiasts.
The survey of the Great Wall’s length involved thousands of people, with 15 provinces and regions submitting the results of their research to Beijing. The State Administration certified 43,721 known sites of Great Wall remains, up from 18,344 before the survey. (Portions of the list were published on the agency’s website, although it did not include the locations in Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces that the Koreans contest. China will not release maps because they are considered a state secret.)
The difficulty is in defining what is “the Great Wall” and what is merely an old wall.
What most people recognize as the Great Wall is the crenelated brick wall with watch towers and archer slits, the symbol of China from countless postcards and tour guides.
But there are many older walls that date from the seventh century that served the common purpose of defending China from invasion from the north.
The late Luo Zhewen, who was considered the top Chinese authority on the subject, once wrote that nothing should be considered the Great Wall unless it was at least 30 miles long, clearly defensive in nature and not circular - as opposed to a wall to keep your sheep from wandering.
Others have argued for more inclusive definitions.
“There is no consensus about what is [the] Great Wall,” said David Spindler, an American who is considered a leading expert.
He has found a number of previously unrecognized segments, in part by poring over Ming dynasty texts, and he believes that more will be discovered.
The profusion of walls, some overlapping or running parallel, reflects history’s changing boundaries and allegiances, although the constant in the geopolitical equation was the threat from Mongol invaders to the north.
Information for this report was contributed by Jonathan Kaiman and Tommy Yang of the Los Angeles Times’ Beijing bureau.
Front Section, Pages 9 on 07/22/2012