Saturday, October 05, 2019

Castles in China

I was starting some research on weapon technology transfer, and found this on castles in China, and decided not to wait for my final essay.

Many Chinese cities were walled and fortified, and some of the fortifications were quite large. Pingyao's city wall approached Ninevah's in height. The Forbidden City is effectively a large castle.

But since China usually succeeded in centralizing power, it didn't need as many non-frontier fortifications as the European patchwork of mini-states did--in fact, they would be a risk to the central state. I suspect I'll learn that warlords' castles were dismantled when the new Emperor conquered them.

But there were families with fortified compounds too. There's probably a lot of history in there.

No comments: