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Great Wall Of China

February 28, 2012 by · Comments Off on Great Wall Of China 

Great Wall Of China, A British explorer has discovered a previously uncharted section of the Great Wall of China “marooned” in the deserts of Mongolia, the first part believed to have been found outside of the country.

William Lindesay led an expedition into the Gobi desert last autumn in search of a wall that had been lost for almost a thousand years. What he found was that a section of the Great Wall, last recorded in a 12th-century atlas of Genghis Khan’s battles, still stands.

“We reached it on the middle of the second day,” he said. “We found a wall that was around shin-high. But as we followed it for 10 minutes, we came over a rise and there was a wonderful section, taller than my shoulders and stretching for several hundred feet,” he said.

The news of his discovery is likely to cause a sensation in China and will be published next month as the lead story in National Geographic magazine.

The section of the wall he discovered runs for about 100 kilometres.

It is built from a mash of earth and branches of “saksoul,” a local shrub.

Lindesay arrived in China in 1986 to make a 2,460-kilometre journey, by foot, along the remnants of the Great Wall.

Lindesay believes that this section of the wall may have been built in the Han dynasty, around 120 BC, to defend the area against the Xiongnu, a federation of nomad warriors that China had been battling.

But carbon testing on the samples that the team brought back dated the wall to the 11th or 12th centuries.

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