Kept barbarians out.
Wrong. Kept Han-Chinese in. Who would have thought? No you didn't. No you did not think that. LIAR, LIAR, YOUR UNDERPANTS ARE ON FIRE!
Really, isn't that what we all "know?" Look it up in Wikipedia: Great Wall of China: built to protect "against intrusions." Others know better:
"Thus the Great Wall(s)...were seen officially as a barrier to barbarians, whereas, in fact, they were built just as surely to hold a taxpaying, sedentary, cultivating population within the ambit of state power." (James C. Scott, "The Art of Not Being Governed," 173).
This is a Gestalt shift. Walls do have two sides, an outside and an inside. When I go to the jailhouse (to visit clients) I don't look at the walls and think they're to keep me out; I know they're to keep the inmates in. Different walls for different folks.
Professor Scott explains that by "seen officially" he means that the "civilizational discourse" of the function of the Great Wall was to keep barbarians out. In other words that was the Chinese state's version and since that version comported with one common sense understanding of the function of walls it stuck. The purpose of the Great Wall of course was both as defense against invasion and as jail (Professor Scott's word is "enclosure"):
"We know that some of the border Chinese began to follow the same line of divergent evolution [pastoral nomadism] and that it was to retain the Chinese within China as well as to keep the new style barbarians out of China that the Great Wall was built." (Owen Lattimore, "The Frontier in History," (1962) cited by Scott, 172).
In popular understanding, in Wikipedia, in other scholarly literature (1) the emphasis is clearly on The Great Wall as defensive. The Great Wall failed as a defense; it succeeded as a jail. It was a tool used by the state to keep hold of the Han-Chinese and contributed to China's successful state-building.
(1) See, e.g. John W. Head, "China's Legal Soul," pp 7, 8, 50-1.
