A "gripping, colorful" history of China's Great Wall that explores the conquests and cataclysms of the empire from 1000 BC to the present day ( Publishers Weekly).

Over two thousand years old, the Great Wall of China is a symbolic and physical dividing line between the civilized Chinese and the "barbarians" at their borders. Historian Julia Lovell looks behind the intimidating fortification and its mythology to uncover a complex history far more fragmented and less illustrious that its crowds of visitors imagine today.

Lovell's story winds through the lives of the millions of individuals who built and attacked it, and recounts how succeeding dynasties built sections of the wall as defenses against the invading Huns, Mongols, and Turks, and how the Ming dynasty, in its quest to create an empire, joined the regional ramparts to make what the Chinese call the "10,000 Li" or the "long wall."

An epic that reveals the true history of a nation, The Great Wall is "a supremely inviting entrée to the country" and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand China's past, present, and future ( Booklist).

Julia Lovell was born in 1975 and lectures in Chinese history and literature at Cambridge University, where she is one of the university's young teachers. She has spent extended periods in China and has recently translated the prize-winning Chinese novel, A Dictionary of Maqiao. She writes on China for the Times, the Observer, the Economist and the Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Cambridge and is married to the writer Robert MacFarlane.