how the mongols breached the great wall?

but I have a magazine that always was accurate that tells that the Mongols just ride around it

I have heard that the Mongols simply bypassed the Great wall by sending Subedei with 30000 men to fiegn an attack on the great wall. Tricking the Jin into sending many of thier reinforcements there. While Genghis Khan and the main army of the Mongols went around the great wall and attacked from the west, catching the Jin completely by surprise.

I have also been to an exhibition recently about the great wall and would like to say how incredibly ingenius the technology and engineering was. Particularly during the Ming dynasty, at this time the soldiers stationed on "the great wall" (I know that there were in fact multiple seperate walls) slept on internally heated benches, and used explosive Rockets disguised as crows!!!

Pekau,

Also throwing dead bodies only work when laying seige to a city.  If you are referring to the Great Wall, it probably will not work.

Jiangwei

Ok, honestly. Just because Mongolian armies depended on horses does not mean that they can't get over the wall? It's like saying if we pave a river in front of our defense, the enemy tanks can't come in. I must say that Mongols must had a bit more difficulties... but come on. They could easily shower the wall defenders with arrows, cannons (After Mongolians got this technology from the Chinese) and just about anything else that they could think of. I heard that when Mongolians encounter a heavily fortified defense, they catapulted the dead boddies around or in the defense and allow the diseases from the dead bodies to infect and weaken the defense� but who knows. If you watched how Mongolians breached Kim�s great wall in South Park, it doesn�t seem that hard to breach the walls�

Song China's lose again proved the importance of strategical territory. Song's army was much more advanced in weapons and armors. Their training were good, too. But this most wealthy and advanced country at its time in the world could not stop Mongol's advancing. Not because Song's generals did not well enough, it was just beyond their ability. When the northern vast land occupied by nomads, even the great Yangtze river could not bar the enemy, let alone a simple wall. When the Song soldiers sheltered in the heavily fortified castles shooting the enemy with their half auto firearms, they were doomed to final failure.  They gave their initiatives to the Mongols and could never take it back.  Mongols had much more men to employ, much more horses to ride, much more natural resources to smith into weapons. Though the mongols suffered more casualties, they won at last. Song's defeat arised from the lose of nothern territory, and uncontrol of the West Reign, Manchuria etc.

i don t know, it is pretty hard to imagine that a siege could actually happen under the great wall. i did a little research and it showed that the use of great wall was to send signals, it would only be used as defence fortification during critical situation. as you know, there are many little station on the great wall act as post for patrols consist of 5 soidiers so when ever that discover a possible enemy invasion, they would set up fire to signal the next station, and signal the next... eventually the army will be notified of an enemy invasion and send reinforcement.

During the Song Dynasty Period, the defenses were two fold: 1. a northern defense centered around key PASSES south and southwest of Peking against the Liao Khitans  2. a western defense centered around the Wei River basin and Chang'an (or what was left of it) against the Xi Xia Tanguts.  On top of the two defenses, a professional, burgeoning central imperial guard army patrolled the Yellow River Basin around Kaifeng, the capital.  The imperial guard army was known to expand to as much as 800,000, the largest imperial guard army in Chinese history.

The Song never controlled the entirety of northern and western China, and so never controlled the northern and western parts that a traditional great wall would run through.  Key Passes along the northern and western frontiers were much more efficient and economical.

For the Jin Jurchens, the southern frontier against the Song was a much more formidable challenge - up to the time of Genghis Khan.   The later Southern Song defenses were threefold: 1. a western defense line along Hanzhong and northern Sichuan 2. supported by a defense line along Xiangyang (this key defense line was only broken after 2 years of seige by Mongols in 1272) 3. a heavily patrolled eastern defense line along the Huai River, which gathered the most elite Southern Song troops, because this defense line protected the capital, Linan.

After the Mongols gobbled the Jurchen Jin, Mongke Khan wisely developed a strategy of invasion against the Southern Song: attacking weaker south and southwestern defense lines first, before turning to the heavier eastern defense lines.  Thus began the Mongol incursions into Sichuan - led by Mongke Khan himself - and the subsequent surrendering of Dali forced by Subetai's son.  The incursions into Sichuan were carried out in conjunction with Khubelai's against the Xiangyang defense line.

The biggest turning point in the Southern Song-Mongol war was the Mongols' eventual success in the seige of Xiangyang, essentially eliminating the entire western defense lines of the Southern Song, and laying Linan vulnerable to a final, concentrated southern march led by Bayan.  What happened afterwards - Zhang Shijie's defeat on the Yantze River and the surrender of Linan - was inevitable.


Edited by poirot - 01-Jan-2007 at 20:10

The great wall built by the Qin and Han were not used by the Jin. Those walls had long fallen out of repair when the Mongols arrived. The Jin, however, had their own fortifications similar to the great wall, but as others have mentioned, a long fortification like the great wall is not a very formidable defense. To put things into perspective, the great wall, even in its Ming Dynasty form, was not more fortified than city walls. On the other hand, the "great wall" was longer, which meant that it was more vulnerable and more difficult to defend. If an army can storm a city wall, then it is obviously strong enough to break through a fortification on the open.

However, the misconception that there was a wall formidable enough to resist the Mongol invasion led some early western historians to propose that the Mongols outflanked the wall by attacking from the west through the Gansu region.

Originally posted by Praetorian Originally posted by white knight hey guys i need information about how the mongols breached the great wall of china. thanks.   Well simple, using siege weapons, and they also went around it� Dang Mongols  They kill thats all they do!

The chinese workers who worked day and knight by force let them in. the government in china at the time was very mean to low class farmers, and the low class let the mongolians in hoping that they would give them more freedom.