how the mongols breached the great wall?

Originally posted by Siege Tower actually, chinese repaire great wall every year before Jin dynasty, so for a hundred years without repairing, the great wall was extremely damaged, and by the time mongols came, the wall pretty much lost it's effect.

In Jan of 07 Osprey Publishing will offer a book on the Great Wall by Stephen Turnbull.

Originally posted by Turk Nomad Originally posted by Siege Tower turks???????!!!!!???   Nearly %85 of army was Asian Turkic tribesman friend =)

Presuming you mean 85% of the 'Mongol' army, this only applies to armies of the Golden Horde, Blue Hord and later Timurid dynasties.

Originally posted by tadamson Originally posted by Turk Nomad Originally posted by Siege Tower turks???????!!!!!???   Nearly %85 of army was Asian Turkic tribesman friend =) Presuming you mean 85% of the 'Mongol' army, this only applies to armies of the Golden Horde, Blue Hord and later Timurid dynasties.

The Mongols encountered no Great Wall when they conquered
China. They were briefly held up at Chu-yung-kuan by the Chin,
who had strengthened their bastion impressively. The gates were
"sealed with iron and the surrounding country (approximately 30
miles) strewn with caltrops."...One can agree with the modern geographer Pai Mei-ch'u BE, who stated that most of the early walls have long since disappeared, and that what survive today are Ming works.

Arthur N. Waldron: The Problem of The Great Wall of China, in: Havard Journal ofAsiatic Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2. (Dec., 1983), pp. 643-663 (656)

In Jan of 07 Osprey Publishing will offer a book on the Great Wall by Stephen Turnbull.

Well we can hope........

but I don't expect too much from translations of Japaese works... 

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.

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 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.

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