-- secrets continued--

• All of this was achieved at great economic and human costs. The emperor thought the wall would bring peace to the nation but the nation was weakened by the heavy cost of the construction. Ditches along the wall were filled with the corpses of workers who died building the wall. Deaths of wall workers are estimated to exceed one million. Some have claimed that the dead workers were entombed in the wall itself.
  Later investigations proved this untrue. Also decaying bodies would have weakened the structure and would not have been allowed. No society could sustain such a terrible burden. Taxation became heavier and heavier. Some 3,500,000 people were involved in the building of the Great Wall. That was 70% of the total population of China at that time. For each worker working on the wall, six were required to feed and support them. Construction of the Qin wall became the most hated imperial project in Chinese history.

• In 209 BC, only a year after the death of the Qin Emperor, millions of peasants rose up and ended the tyranny and bloodshed of wall building. The Qin Dynasty had fallen, brought down by the building of the great wall. Within ten years much of the wall was a neglected ruin. Once again the northern border was at the mercy of the northern invaders. After three years of civil war in 206 BC the first Han Dynasty was formed under the Gao Di Emperor, Liu Bang.

• To consolidate their victories they began to mark out their new extended borders. Here the soil consists of a gravel of sand and small stones. They used alternating layers of red willow and the gravel and lots of tamping. This produced a wall that has survived for some 2,000 years.

Continued...........