THE Great Wall of China developed out of an earlier system of walled frontiers to which relatively little attention has been paid,' though notable advances have been made in recent years, especially by Chinese research workers, in textual criticism, in the geographical identification of early place names, and in clarifying the historical sequence of relations between the Chinese and various tribal peoples.2 It is now possible to use this rich critical and documentary material to carry speculation and discovery a stage further. What factors in the society of China promoted the development of the Great XVall form of frontier delimitation? Once the main line of the Great Wall had been established, implying the concept that the Frontier should be absolute and immovable, does the working of any of the factors that can be detected in agriculturally based China and in the nomadic pastoral society of the steppe help to explain the way in which, through century after century of the ebb and flow of conquest, this inherently permanent kind of frontier was obliterated, reestablished, and modified?
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Owen Lattimore (1937) studied this question.