[Illustration: FIG. 46.--THE GREAT WALL. (_Univers Pittoresque._)] [Sidenote: THE GREAT WALL] To secure a sufficient number of men to work at his wall, Shih-Hwang-Ti issued an edict ordering every third labourer throughout the whole of the Empire to labour at it, and the unfortunate men thus selected were forced to work like slaves, with no wages but a scanty supply of food, their places when they fell down dead being quickly taken by other victims. The wall, when completed at the cost of so great an expenditure of human life, was fifteen hundred miles long; its breadth at the bottom was nearly twenty-five feet, and at the top fifteen feet, whilst it varied in height from fifteen to thirty feet. The materials employed would, it is said, be enough to build a wall six feet high and two feet thick to go twice round the world. Six horsemen could ride abreast upon it, and it was fortified by very strong towers, placed at regular intervals of about one hundred yards, that is to say, within two arrow-shots of each other, so that any one attempting to scale it would be covered from one tower or another by the guards stationed in them. The construction of the wall was very strong, the outside being formed of stone and brickwork, whilst the inside was filled up with earth. The wall started from the sea-shore at the Shan-Hai Pass, in N. Lat. 40° and E. Long. 119° 50′, and ran over mountains, through valleys, and across rivers by means of arches, which are still marvels of engineering skill, to the most western province of Kan-su, where it ends at the Khiya Pass. Whilst only insignificant relics now remain of the immense Roman walls which once intersected England and France, this vast monument of an ambitious ruler still stands, ranking as one of the wonders of the world, an incidental proof that at the time of its erection, two thousand years ago, China must have already been a great and civilized Empire. There is no doubt that Shih-Hwang-Ti did succeed in centralizing authority, and absorbing the power of the numerous military chiefs who before his time reigned in the various small kingdoms, making up what is now the Celestial Empire. [Sidenote: BURNING OF MSS.] Unfortunately, however, the monarch aimed rather at his own aggrandizement than at the good of his people, and his vainglorious desire to be looked upon as the founder of the Chinese monarchy led him to issue that celebrated edict, ordering all books and writings referring to his predecessors to be burnt, which inflicted an incalculable loss on future students of history. Those who endeavoured to evade this sweeping decree were to be punished by death, and according to some accounts, hundreds of literati were burnt on piles of the MSS. they had tried to save. In spite of all precautions, however, some few copies of the works of Confucius and other great writers were successfully hidden and brought out again on the death of the tyrant.