The Very Many Answers to “How Long Did It Take to Build the Great Wall of China”

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The most common answer you will get to this question is probably “It took over 2000 years to build the Great Wall of China”; followed by something between 200-300 years; and accompanied by answers like “about 10 years”, “more than 300 years”, or simply “hundreds and thousands of years”.

After a few rounds, you’d probably be scratching your head, thinking, how can such simple question about one of the most well-known structures in the world generate such drastically diverse answers!

In fact, most of these answers more or less have some validity depending on the point of reference. Here at MyTravel-China, we like to take a closer look at things. So let’s begin!

Calculating “How Long Did It Take to Build the Great Wall of China”

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To determine how long something took, mathematically speaking, it’s basically:
how long something took = the time when it ended – the time when it began

In the case of the Great Wall of China, the answer to “When did the construction of the Great Wall end” is relatively straightforward. The Great Wall of China is a collection of walls, each section of the Great Wall has a different completion time, but overall, the construction of the Great Wall of China ended towards the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368 AD – 1644 AD) around 1620 AD.

Of course, it is the question about “When did the construction of the Great Wall of China begin?” that is up for debate. Well, without going into too much detail (the detail of “when was the Great Wall of China built”), here’s the roundup of some popular arguments and their reasoning:

1. Construction began in 8th century BC because that’s when the Chinese began building defensive fortification walls and the Great Wall of China is essentially a defensive fortification wall system.
2. Construction began in 5th century BC because that’s when the Chinese began building extensive defensive fortification walls. To be considered as a part of the Great Wall of China, it had to be extensive.
3. Construction began in 221 BC because the wall built by the First Emperor of China is considered the Great Wall of China because of its great length and scope.
4. Construction began during the Ming Dynasty in 1368 AD because that is the overwhelming majority (90+%) of the Great Wall of China we see today. For the same reason, officially, the Great Wall of China actually refers to the Ming Dynasty Great Wall.

There you have it, we are looking at answers ranging from almost 2500 years to 200+ years depending on your assumption.

Now, you can probably see why this is in fact a quite complicated question to answer. To complicate things even more, our common sense tells us that most probably the Chinese weren’t building the Great Wall of China during that whoooole time. Historians would certainly agree with that.

Building The Great Wall of China – Timeline Background

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So work-time / building-time / construction-time alone, how long did it really take to build the Great Wall of China? We’ll take an (not so) accurate attempt at answering this very complex question.

Let’s start off with this Wikipedia graph that shows which dynasties in Chinese history built the Great Wall. Wikipedia takes the stance that construction of the Great Wall started in 5th century BC and we think that’s reasonable. Summing up the timeline on the bottom, we get the following dynasties that built the Great Wall of China:

• Warring States Period (475 BC – 221 BC): 254 years
• Qin (221 BC – 206 BC): 15 years
• Han (206 BC – 220 AD): 426 years
• Northern Wei (386 AD – 584 AD): 198 years
• Northern Qi (550 AD – 577 AD): 27 years (not counted, overlaps Northern Wei)
• Sui (581 AD – 618 AD): 37 years
• Liao (907 AD – 1125 AD): 208 years
• Jin (1115 AD – 1234 AD): 119 years (10-year overlap with Jin, only counts 109 years)
• Ming (1368 AD – 1644 AD): 276 years

Excluding the overlapping periods, this method narrows our answer to “up to 1523 years” during which the Great Wall of China was being constructed.

You didn’t think we were going to stop here, did you? Let’s take this one more step further and break down the Great Wall building during each dynasty. After some research, we’ve come to the following rough estimates:

• Warring States Period (475 BC – 221 BC): Five out of seven states were constructing the Great Wall over the 254 years. Detailed Great Wall construction timeline was not readily available.
• Qin (221 BC – 206 BC): Construction of the Great Wall of China took 9 years.
• Han (206 BC – 220 AD): It turns out, during the 426 years of reign, a relatively small amount of time was devoted to building the Great Wall. Emperors from Han Wen Di 汉文帝 (202 BC – 157 BC) to Han Xuan Di 汉宣帝 (91 BC – 49 BC) undertook constructing the Great Wall of China, with major building efforts from 121 BC – 101 BC. Assuming the longest period, construction of the Great Wall of China took 153 years (202-49=153) during the Han Dynasty.
• Northern Wei (386 AD – 584 AD): Construction happened during the following years: 423, 224, 534, 543.
• Northern Qi (550 AD – 577 AD): Built the Great Wall between approximately 552 AD to 565 AD for about 13 years.
• Sui (581 AD – 618 AD): Constructed the Great Wall from 581 AD to 608 AD for almost 27 years.
• Liao (907 AD – 1125 AD): During 908 AD and 1058 AD -1065 AD for approximately 8 years.
• Jin (1115 AD – 1234 AD): Built the Great Wall approximately from 1123 AD to 1198 AD for about 75 years – lacking detailed information.
• Ming (1368 AD – 1644 AD): Used about 230 years to build the Great Wall of China that we see today.

There it is, excluding the Warring States Period, it took up to 519 years (9+153+4+13+27+8+75+230=519) to build the Great Wall of China based on the information we collected. As for the building time of a section of Great Wall of China (remember the Great Wall is a collection of walls?), it seems to vary greatly from days to decades depending on the amount of resources used, urgency, difficulty, and of course, length.

While you are at it, you may also be interested in knowing “How long is the Great Wall of China“, “When was the Great Wall of China Built“, “Who built the Great Wall of China“, “Can you see Great Wall of China from the Moon“. Of course, if you’d like to visit the Great Wall of China in person, be sure to check out our current notable sites of the Great Wall of China section for some travel tips.