Introduction: What is the Great Wall of China? -- Part I: First considerations -- Early Chinese walls -- Strategic origins of Chinese walls -- Part II: The making of the Great Wall -- Geography and strategy: the importance of the Ordos -- Security without walls: early Ming strategy and its collapse -- Toward a new strategy: the Ordos crisis and the first walls -- Politics and military policy at the turn of the sixteenth century -- The second debate over the Ordos -- The heyday of wall-building -- Part III: The significances of wall-building -- The Great Wall and foreign policy: the problem of compromise -- The Wall acquires new meanings -- Glossary
Summary
A scholarly study of the Great Wall of China; draws both on primary sources and on the latest archaeology
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 256-278) and index
