The man who discovered the lost Great Wall

By William Wang

CRI, March 28, 2012

Having seen the wall firsthand, Lindesay was particularly pleased that he'd gotten his hands on some wood samples from the wall, which would be able to be radiocarbon dated.

He expected the samples to be 2100 years old, but he was amazed when the samples only turned out to be only 900 years old. "It kind of put the spanner in the works. Immediately I wondered, is this Han wall? From 2100 years ago? Then I thought because of the jigsaw theory, it matches up with the wall in China… so I'm adamant that it's Han dynasty Great Wall, but what I think the radiocarbon dating proves is that the wall was reused at some stage later."

Lindesay proposed that the Western Xia dynasty rebuilt the wall in preparation against the Mongols. But this theory was not without its problems. There's no record of the western Xia dynasty building a Great Wall, so Lindesay argued that as Genghis Kahn's legacy included annihilating those who opposed him and everything that they built, it would be unsurprising to find a lack of evidence.

If the western Xia dynasty's history was obliterated, Lindesay is well aware of the problems that would result from the damaged historical record. The existing history of the western Xia was written over a century later by Chinese historians employed by Mongol conquerors of China. "I think there must be a lot of questions about the accuracy, the comprehensiveness and authenticity of the records," Lindesay conceded.

Undoubtedly, some of the questions around this section of the "lost" Great Wall may ultimately be unanswerable. But perhaps in Lindesay's case, the questions may be more important than the answers.

"I like to either go out and prove history right or prove it wrong and dig up some questions, and this present trip from China to Outer Mongolia has been a classic case of that."