Book excerpt: In this seminal and controversial debut, Julia Lovell tackles the history of China - and its relationship with the wider world - through the dramatic story of its most famous landmark. Fabled to be 2200 years old and 4300 miles long, the Great Wall seems to make an overwhelmingly confident physical statement about China's age-old sense of itself as an advanced civilisation anxious to draw a line, keeping the "barbarians" at its borders. But behind the Wall's intimidating exterior - and the myths that have built up around it - lies a complex history of China's view of the outside world, and itself. Lovell looks behind the modern mythology of the Great Wall, uncovering a three-thousand-year history far more fragmented, bloody and less illustrious than its crowds of visitors imagine today. The story of the Wall winds through that of the Chinese empire and the frontier policy that defined it. Lovell restores a human dimension to this astonishing structure, writing about the emperors who planned new phases of building, the people who constructed, lived next to and guarded the walls, and the millions who died - of overwork, starvation, cold and battle. The Great Wall is an epic history which explores the conquests and cataclysms of the Chinese empire over the past 3000 years. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand China's past, present and future.