Chinese City Wall - Composition

Composition

Many Chinese cities were deliberately sited and planned. City walls, when not constrained by geography, tend to be rectangular or square. Philosophical and even feng shui considerations were adopted in siting gates and towers, and the walled city itself.

Chinese cities rarely centre on a castle. Instead, the city's administrative centre is spread over a relatively large area, which may or may not be surrounded by a second set of "inner" walls similar in shape and construction to the main, outer wall.

Long-term strategic considerations adopted in the planning process also meant that the walls of important cities often enclosed an area much larger than the existing urban areas, both in order to ensure excess capacity for growth, and to secure resources such as timber and farmland in times of war. Thus, for example, the city wall of Quanzhou in Fujian still contained one quarter vacant land by 1945. The city wall of Suzhou by the Republic of China era still contained large tracts of farmland. The City Wall of Nanjing, built in the Ming Dynasty, enclosed an area large enough to house an airport, bamboo forests, and lakes in modern times.

Several features are typical of most Chinese city walls.