The Great Wall of China Trivia Quiz

Answer: Richard Nixon

U.S. President Richard M. Nixon visited the Great Wall on February 24, 1972, during his historic trip to China.

He went on to say: "My hope is that in the future, perhaps as a result of the beginning that we have made on this journey, that many, many Americans, particularly the young Americans who like to travel so much, will have an opportunity to come here as I have come here today with Mrs. Nixon and the others in our party, that they will be able to see this Wall, that they will think back as I think back to the history of this great people, and that they will have an opportunity, as we have had an opportunity, to know the Chinese people, and know them better."

Answer: Mao Zedong

This is the third line of Chairman Mao's "Mount Liupan", which was written near the end of the Long March in October 1935.

Answer: The bones of her husband

The story goes that her husband was conscripted for corvée labor to build the Wall. When he perished due to the harsh conditions on the northern frontier, his body - along with many other corpses - was thrown into the Wall to serve as "fill". The story is set in the Qin dynasty (circa 221 BC) when the first complete or continuous Great Wall was built at the command of the First Emperor, but the earliest surviving version was actually written much later during the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907).

Answer: It includes many kilometers of ditches and natural defensive barriers (such as rivers).

Yes, not all of this "Wall" is really wall, strictly speaking, since the total includes 359 km of trenches and 2,232 km of "natural defensive barriers such as hills and rivers". Another survey found all "branches" of the Wall to total a whopping 21,196 km.

Answer: Dirt

The traditional method of building defensive walls in northern China, dating from Neolithic times, was to pour dirt into the space between wooden frames, pound it down until it was compressed and very hard, then pour in more dirt and repeat the process, building up the wall layer by layer. Many of these "hangtu" walls of tamped earth have survived from ancient times, among them the Shang city wall at Zhengzhou (dating from about 1500 BC).

The brick and stone walls that tourists visit near Beijing were built quite recently, under the Ming dynasty in the 16th century, and are not really representative of the Wall across either space or time.

Answer: Beidaihe

Badaling is the most touristed (and touristy) section of the Wall. Mutianyu and Gubeikou are a little less developed. Beidaihe is not part of the Wall at all; it's a seaside resort community east of Beijing where China's leaders like to relax during the summer.

Answer: The place where the Great Wall meets the sea, traditionally regarded as its eastern terminus.

Old Dragon Head (Lao Long Tou) is located near the town of Shanhaiguan at the eastern end of the Great Wall. Shanhaiguan literally means "mountain sea pass," and this is where the Manchus entered China in 1644. Today it has a restored old town (walled, of course) and a Great Wall museum, and is worth a visit if you're traveling in China.

Answer: 1

This is supposed to have happened during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and the legendary brick is still on display at Jiayuguan.

Answer: Neil Armstrong

Armstrong even denied that it could be seen from low Earth orbit: "I do not believe that, at least with my eyes, there would be any man-made object that I could see. I have not yet found somebody who has told me they've seen the Wall of China from Earth orbit. I'm not going to say there aren't people, but I personally haven't talked to them. I've asked various people, particularly Shuttle guys, that have been many orbits around China in the daytime, and the ones I've talked to didn't see it."

Stukeley, an English antiquarian, made the earliest version of the Moon claim in the mid-18th century. It was repeated by Henry Norman in the 19th century, and Robert Ripley included it in one of his "Believe It or Not" panels in May 1932. You can find the image reproduced on page 213 of Arthur Waldron's "The Great Wall of China," published by Cambridge University Press in 1990.

Answer: Long walls

This translation is actually preferred by some scholars who have written about the Wall in English. The essential point is that our image of a continuous, thousands-of-miles-long, 2000-year-old wall running along all of China's traditional northern border and looking exactly like the restored 16th-century section at Badaling is just that - a mental image of ours rather than a physical or historical reality.