Chinese city walls grew so thick they held back cannon development
Jericho had a wall around it in the eighth millennium BC, making walls one of humanity's oldest large projects. For thousands of years nearly every city needed one. In China they grew so massive that, according to historian Tonio Andrade, bigger cannon never paid off, since even industrial-era guns struggled to breach them.
Defensive walls range from simple palisades and earth banks to stone curtain walls studded with towers, bastions and gates. Builders folded rivers and coastlines into their circuits where they could. Uruk in Sumer is among the oldest walled cities known, and Europe's earliest town wall surrounds Solnitsata, built in the sixth or fifth millennium BC. Beyond defence, walls advertised a community's status and independence.
Mesopotamian empires built on an enormous scale. The Assyrians mobilised huge workforces for walls, palaces and temples, and Nebuchadnezzar enlarged Babylon's walls and added the Ishtar Gate. Persia raised long barriers against nomads on both sides of the Caspian Sea, among them the Derbent Wall and the Great Wall of Gorgan. In the Indus Valley, the houses of Kot Diji sheltered behind stone flood dykes and walls because neighbours fought constantly over farmland.
China began with rammed earth: the Shang capital at Ao, from around 1600 BC onward, had enormous walls of it. Stone appeared during the Warring States era, but the large-scale switch waited for the Tang dynasty. Parts of the Great Wall predate the Qin, who linked and strengthened them, yet most of what visitors see today reflects rebuilding under the Ming between 1368 and 1644. The Yongle Emperor gave Beijing's Forbidden City its walls in the early fifteenth century.
Southeast Asia mostly came late to fully walled cities. Burma was an exception, with city walls by 1566; in 1755 Rangoon was ringed by teak stockades on an earth rampart with six gates, each flanked by big brick towers. Elsewhere in the region walls spread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as cities grew and feared European naval attack: Ayutthaya walled itself in 1550, Surabaya and several Javanese ports did so by 1600, and Makassar by 1634. Towns without full circuits typically had at least a stockaded royal citadel.
Source: Defensive wall
