Note 6 — JOHN BELL.

Authors are not at all agreed respecting the period at which this wall was erected. Gibbon, relying apparently on the testimony of Duhalde (Description de la China, tom. ii. p. 45) and Deguignes (Hist. des Huns, tom. ii. p. 59), gives the third century before the Christian era as the date of its construction, and assigns it a length of fifteen hundred miles.—(History, vol. iv. p. 361.) Du Pauw, an ingenious but conceited and coxcombical writer, makes no objection to the antiquity of the work, but reduces its length to about four hundred and fifty miles; and this without citing any authority, or even stating his reasons, except that he does not choose to consider the western branch, which, he tells us, is built of earth, worthy the name of a wall.—(Recherch. Phil. sur les Egypt. et Chin. tom. ii. p. 77-79.) For my own part, I am inclined to agree with those writers who think it an entirely modern work, erected since the thirteenth century; for the silence of Marco Polo appears to me absolutely decisive. Du Pauw’s supposition that he could have entered China from Mongolia, that is, passed through the wall, and lived eighteen years in the country, which he traversed in every direction, without once hearing of its existence, is too absurd even for refutation. That he abstained from describing it, lest he should excite a suspicion of the truth of his narrative, though somewhat more probable perhaps, does not upon the whole seem credible. If it existed in his time, I can account for his silence, or rather for the absence of all mention of it in his travels, as they at present exist, only by supposing that the passage in which this extraordinary work was alluded to, was, like many other passages, omitted from ignorant incredulity by transcribers, and so lost. Thus, too, we may account for no mention of tea being found in his travels.