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The Great wall of China
Engravers: Butterworth and Heath
Illustrators: Justyne, Leitch, Macquoid, Morgan, Pasquier, and G. H. Thomas
1864
Wood-engraving
16 cm high by 14 cm wide, framed.
Cassell's Robinson Crusoe, page 341.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
In two days more we passed the great China wall, made for a fortification against the Tartars: and a very great work it is, going over hills and mountains in an endless track, where the rocks are impassable, and the precipices such as no enemy could possibly enter, or indeed climb up, or where, if they did, no wall could hinder them. They tell us its length is near a thousand English miles, but that the country is five hundred in a straight measured line, which the wall bounds without measuring the windings and turnings it takes; it is about four fathoms high, and as many thick in some places.
I stood still an hour or thereabouts without trespassing on our orders (for so long the caravan was in passing the gate), to look at it on every side, near and far off; I mean what was within my view: and the guide, who had been extolling it for the wonder of the world, was mighty eager to hear my opinion of it. I told him it was a most excellent thing to keep out the Tartars; which he happened not to understand as I meant it and so took it for a compliment; but the old pilot laughed! “Oh, Seignior Inglese,” says he, “you speak in colours.” — “In colours!” said I; “what do you mean by that?”—“Why, you speak what looks white this way and black that way — gay one way and dull another. You tell him it is a good wall to keep out Tartars; you tell me by that it is good for nothing but to keep out Tartars. I understand you, Seignior Inglese, I understand you; but Seignior Chinese understood you his own way.” — “Well,” says I, “do you think it would stand out an army of our country people, with a good train of artillery; or our engineers, with two companies of miners? Would not they batter it down in ten days, that an army might enter in battalia; or blow it up in the air, foundation and all, that there should be no sign of it left?” — “Ay, ay,” says he, “I know that.” The Chinese wanted mightily to know what I said to the pilot, and I gave him leave to tell him a few days after, for we were then almost out of their country, and he was to leave us a little time after this; but when he knew what I said, he was dumb all the rest of the way, and we heard no more of his fine story of the Chinese power and greatness while he stayed.
After we passed this mighty nothing, called a wall, something like the Picts’ walls so famous in Northumberland, built by the Romans, we began to find the country thinly inhabited. . . . [Chapter XIV, "Attacked by Tartars," page 363]
Now a national symbol, the only human edifice visible from space, the Great Wall of China represented China's political dominance in the past and its struggle to maintain itself as an imperial power in the nineteenth century. Shortly before Defoe wrote the novel, towards the end of the Ming dynasty (1369–1644), emperors had begun to rebuild, re-man, and expand the existing system of the Walls, incorporating border territories that originally lay beyond the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) wall.
Majestic mountains straight out of romantic landscape rise above the wall, but, oddly enough, the illustrator has positioned the party of merchants so that they are approaching from the Tartar side. The Chinese settlement, complete with two pagodas, lies on the far side of the wall. Again, in the vast landscape the illustrator has lost Crusoe in the group of travellers, lower right, in order to create an appropriate to create a suitable panorama.
Left: Thomas Stothard's elegant dining scene, A Chinese gentleman at his repast (1790). Right: Cruikshank's characterization of China through a single pompous official: The Mandarin being fed by his female servants (1831). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
In the John Major edition Cruikshank's woodblock vignette plays upon traditional prejudices about the corrupt and inept governance of the vast Chinese empire: The ill-mounted Mandarin riding through Tartary (1831). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. Related by himself. With upwards of One Hundred Illustrations. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1863-64.
Last modified 15 April 2018