Qin Great Wall belongs to the years before the Common Era — dated here to c. 221 BCE at northern China. The date is a scholarly centre of gravity, not a foundation-stone timestamp.
Qin Shi Huang linked older state walls into a northern barrier of rammed earth — the political ancestor of the stone Ming wall tourists walk.
How it was made
Tamped earth, beacon towers, and conscript labour on a continental scale. Sima Qian records the human cost.
Why it still counts as a wonder
It never needed a Greek list to be a wonder: the labour, the alignment, or the survival is enough.
Most Qin fabric is eroded. The wonder is the idea of a wall as a state, not the later brick postcard.
On dating
BCE in this series means years before the traditional birth of Christ, counted backward. A monument listed as c. 221 BCE may have been founded earlier, rebuilt later, or famous only in one phase. Where ancient writers disagree — as they do for Babylon’s gardens — we say so.
This is story 84 of 100 in The Trend Ledger’s illustrated desk on world wonders raised before the Common Era.