Mysterious East

The Great Wall of China is even greater than once thought. A two-year government mapping study has uncovered new sections of the ancient Chinese monument which makes it more than 2,551 kilometres (1,585 miles) longer. The Ming Dynasty Great Wall is 8,851.8 kilometres (5,500 miles) long, said the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping.

Using mapping technologies such as infra-red range finders and GPS devices, experts discovered portions of the wall - concealed by hills, trenches and rivers - that stretch from Hu Mountain in northern Liaoning province to Jiayu Pass in western Gansu province. The Ming portion of the Great Wall is the most visually striking and well-preserved portion of the world-famous monument.

The newly mapped parts of the wall were built during the Ming Dynasy (1368-1644) to protect against northern invaders and were submerged over time by sandstorms that moved across the arid region,according to a report posted on the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping Web site.

The additional parts mean the Great Wall - which Chinese emperors began constructing 2,000 years ago to keep out Monguls and invaders - spans about 6,300 kilometres (3,900 miles) through the northern part of the country. The joint project, conducted by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, will continue for another year in order to map sections of the wall built during the Qin (221 B.C.-206 B.C.) and Han (206 B.C.-9 A.D.) Dynasties, the report said.

Recent studies by Chinese archaeologists have shown that sections of the wall in Gansu are being reduced to 'mounds of dirt' by sandstorms and may disappear entirely in 20 years.

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A new study has unearthed 180 more miles of the Great Wall of China which are now hidden by hills and rivers. The Great Wall was constructed over 2000 years ago by Chinese emperors and is over 3900 miles long."The ancient Great Wall of China is even longer than first thought - with a new study showing more has been unearthed.

The extra 180 miles of the ancient Chinese monument were uncovered after a two-year government mapping study, according to an official report."

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Christopher Columbus is said to have been the first who broke down the barrier that was the Atlantic Ocean, that body of water that separated two continents. But no such barriers – whether natural or ideological – existed between Europe and the East – one could travel over land. Nevertheless, the discovery of Caucasoid mummies has provided not only indisputable evidence that Europeans travelled very far East, it has also created controversy. For in the end, it seems that everything in archaeology is also political. At the beginning of the 20th century, the likes of Sven Hedin, Albert von Le Coq and Sir Aurel Stein travelled to the East in search of ancient civilisations, hoping to reach the then forbidden city of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and its ruler, the Dalai Lama. On their travels to this almost mythical region, they stumbled upon many ancient ruins and on occasion spoke about the discoveries of desiccated bodies.In 1907, the Russian explorer Pyotr Kuzmich Koslov (1863-1935) actually reached Lhasa and met the Dalai Lama. Afterwards, he organised further expeditions and excavated Khara Khoto. Khara Khoto was a Tangut city founded in 1032 that had been ruined by the Ming Chinese in 1372. Koslov unearthed a tomb fifty feet below the ruins and found the body of a woman, apparently a queen, accompanied by various sceptres, wrought in gold and other metals. Though Koslov took numerous photographs that were published in “American Weekly”, he was not allowed to disturb or remove anything from the tomb, which was sealed again. His last expedition to Mongolia and Tibet occurred from 1923 to 1926 and resulted in the discovery of Xiongnu royal burials at Noin-Ula. With news of such discoveries being reported back in the West, it was clear that there was a wide interest in the mysteries of the East, which even today remains largely beyond the reach of most tourists. And it were in these remote regions that James Churchward (1851-1936) felt he had found evidence of a lost civilisation: Mu. For Churchward, Mu was a lost civilisation and continent in the East, which he claimed was 50,000 years old and was the home of 64 million inhabitants. He claimed to have found evidence of this civilisation while speaking to a number of Indian men. Though Mu stretched from Micronesia in the West to Easter Island and.

In 1861 at Oshoro, southwestern Hokkaido, a party of herring fishermen, migrants from Honshu, were laying the foundation for a fishing port when they saw taking shape beneath their shovels a mysterious spectacle — a broad circular arrangement of large rocks, strikingly symmetrical, evidently man-made. What could it be? An Ainu fortress?They would have been astonished to learn, as in fact they never did, that the Oshoro Stone Circle is a relic from a time before even war — let alone fortresses — likely existed in Japan.Oshoro today is part of the city of Otaru, onits western fringe, 20 km from the city center and 60 km west of Sapporo. The Late Jomon period (circa 2400-1000 B.C.) was an age of northward migration.

The north was warming, and severe rainfall was ravaging the established Jomon sites, primarily in the vicinity of today's Tokyo and Nagoya. Perhaps resettlement stimulated thought, for it coincided with a novel Jomon institution — the cemetery. "By devoting a special area to burials," writes J. Edward Kidder in "The Cambridge History of Japan," "Late Jomon people were isolating the dead, allowing the gap to be bridged by mediums who eventually drew the rational world of the living further away from the spirit world of the dead." The Oshoro Stone Circle was probably a cemetery. It was otherthings as well, but primarily that, says Naoaki Ishikawa, chief curator of the Otaru Museum, where many of the finds from around this stone circle can be viewed. It is one of about 30 Late Jomon stone circles scattered through northern Japan. In terms of size it ranks about midway between the smallest enclosures and the largest one at Oyu, Akita Prefecture, bounded by thousands of stones. No bones have been found to make an airtight case of the cemetery theory, but relatively few Jomon bones have been found anywhere, the acid in the soil claiming them long before the archaeologist's trowel can. The first archaeologists at work in Japan were American and European. Their heyday was the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Japanese curiosity regarding the remote past was satisfied by nationalistic myths accepted&mdas......