Jiayuguan
Interesting facts
- According to legend, the builder Yi Kaizhan reckoned exactly 99,999 bricks; the single spare one, said to hold the gate tower up, was never moved.
- Mildred Cable noted that an older generation called the pass the 'Gate of the Demons', while its western archway was known to some as the 'Gate of Sighs'.
- The pass's main gate tower was added in 1495, more than a century after the fort itself was founded around 1372.
- The inner fort's two gates are called Guanghua in the east and Rouyuan in the west, and each is shielded by an enclosed barbican.
- Watchtowers, corner towers, beacon towers and the wings of wall running north and south from the fort were added in 1539.
- The inner walls are built of rammed loess about 10.7 metres high and carry fourteen towers of different kinds.
- The fort stands on Jiayu Hill, the highest ground in the narrow valley it guards, with its flanking walls striking out across the Gobi.
- The Jiayuguan section of the Great Wall has been on China's list of nationally protected monuments since 1961.
- Beside the fort stands the Great Wall Museum, described as China's first museum devoted entirely to the history and culture of the Wall.
- Wei and Western Jin tombs found east of Jiayuguan city have painted bricks showing everyday life, from feast preparations to mulberry picking and horse herding.
Why it is worth it
At the narrowest point of the Hexi Corridor in Gansu, between desert and the snow-capped Qilian Mountains, a fortress of rammed earth and brick marks the western end of the Ming dynasty Great Wall. Jiayu Pass, or Jiayuguan, is counted with Juyong Pass and Shanhai Pass among the main passes of the Wall and is regarded as its best-preserved ancient military structure.
The fort was built early in the Ming period, around 1372, beside an oasis that was then on the far western edge of the empire, and it was strengthened when an invasion by Timur was feared — a campaign that ended with Timur's death on the march. The complex forms a trapezoid with walls about 733 metres around and 11 metres high, enclosing more than 33,500 square metres. Three lines of defence — inner fort, outer fort and moat — protect it; gate towers stand over the east and west gates, a turret rises at every corner, and the Great Wall runs off from its north and south sides. Its traditional name, the "Greatest Impregnable Pass Under Heaven", sets it apart from Shanhai Pass at the Wall's eastern end.
For centuries this was the gateway between China and Central Asia. Merchants and envoys on the Silk Road entered through it, and in 1605 the Jesuit Bento de Góis, travelling from India, arrived here — perhaps the first recorded European to enter China through the Wall. The pass also had a darker reputation: exiles banished to the west left by its gate, among them the Qing commissioner Lin Zexu. The traveller Mildred Cable, who came through in 1923, wrote of poems by disgraced officials covering the walls of the outer archway. Local legend holds that the builder calculated the bricks so precisely that only one was left over, and that it still rests on a gate ledge.
The city of Jiayuguan, a steel-making centre founded in the 1960s and named after the fort, lies a few kilometres to the northeast. Jiayu Pass is part of the Great Wall World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1987.
Getting there
The fortress is about 6 km southwest of central Jiayuguan. The nearest airport is Jiayuguan Jiuquan Airport (JGN), about 12 km away. Jiayuguan is on the Lanzhou–Xinjiang railway, and high-speed trains call at Jiayuguan South station; China National Highway 312 also passes the city.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Jiayu Pass or is the first frontier fortress at the west end of the Ming dynasty Great Wall, near the city of Jiayuguan in Gansu province. Along with Juyong Pass and Shanhai Pass, it is one of the main passes of the Great Wall. In the Ming period, foreign merchants and envoys from Central Asia and West Asia mostly entered China through Jiayu Pass.
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