The Walls of Datong and the Town Inside Them

The town inside the wall is the point of the wall. Datong's circuit runs 7,270.7 metres round, stands about fourteen metres high and encloses 2.63 square kilometres of ground; forty metres outside it a moat runs about ten metres wide. That is a garrison plan rather than a market plan: a wall, a wet ditch, and gate courts that could be shut one after another. The line itself is old. The fortifications reach back to the Northern Wei, and the wall now standing is Ming, enlarged in 1372 by the general Xu Da on the foundations of the Liao, Jin and Yuan city. Four gates were set in it, with barbicans and watchtowers.

The gates were the weak points, and they are where the wall's history is written. The four were Heyang in the east, Yongtai in the south, Qingyuan in the west and Wuding in the north. In 1649 Dorgon besieged the city for nine months without taking it; it fell only when Yang Zhenwei, a subordinate of the defending general Jiang Xiang, turned, and Dorgon then ordered a massacre and had five chi cut from the height of the walls. The twentieth century did the rest. Around 1952 the north, east and west gates were demolished, the barbicans and watchtowers came down, the facing bricks were stripped, and the last south gate arch went in 1981.

What stands today is a reconstruction, and it should be read as one. The brick facing had been taken off in the 1950s, leaving a ridge of earth; in 2008, under the mayor Geng Yanbo, the city began a programme of restoration and protection of the historic town, and on 18 November 2016 the circuit was closed and the moat connected again. The line, the gates and the measurements are Ming; the surface is twenty-first century. Walking the line rather than on it is the honest way to see the town, with the old wall on one hand and the streets of the inner city on the other.