In ancient China, of all the great unified dynasties, only the Tang Dynasty, the Yuan Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty did not build the Great Wall on a large scale. If it is said that the most diligent construction of the Great Wall is the Ming Dynasty.
Although the Great Wall originated in the Qin Dynasty, the most complete and spectacular preservation is the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty. The entire Ming Dynasty has a special love for the Great Wall, successive emperors are building the Great Wall, the Ming Dynasty's Great Wall, the longest time, more than 16,000 miles, but preserved, not so much.
The first line of the Great Wall became an important border town of the Ming Dynasty. The Ming Dynasty court, on the basis of the Great Wall, added nine sides, of which the two towns of Xuanda defended Mongolia; the two towns of Jiliao, defending the Jurchens; in the late Ming Dynasty, it spent a lot of money to create a fairly strong defensive line in the Western Liaoning Corridor, from Shanhaiguan in the south to Jinzhou in the north, with more than 400 large and small fortresses in the middle, known as the Guanjin Defense Line.
Even the great thinker Wang Yangming admitted that the ming dynasty's life gate was in Xuanda and Jiliao, and if the two places were lost, the world would be in danger.
It can be seen from this that up to the imperial court and down to the people, they all have a special love for this defensive line in the north, and even regard these defense lines as the foundation of the Ming Dynasty.
By the time of the Qing Dynasty, most of these lines were abandoned, and many people explained that this was because the Qing Dynasty unified northeast china and Mongolia, so this line was useless.
In fact, the Qing Dynasty did not reach its heyday until the twenty-fifth year of Qianlong, and before that, the Qing Dynasty and Mongolia began a century-long struggle.
But we also found another problem, also in response to the attack of the northern Mongols, why did the Qing Dynasty pay less attention to the construction of the northern defensive line?
The Hundred Years' War of the Dzungar Khanate in the Qing Dynasty
If you understand this history, it is not difficult to find a problem, and the Qing Dynasty fighting Mongolia, and the Ming Dynasty fighting Mongolia is not the same, the Qing Dynasty in the absence of entry, began to win over Mongolia, and attack Korea, such a strategy was also used in the Ming Dynasty, that is, during this period of time, Korea and Mongolia became the focus of contention between the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty.
But for many reasons (these reasons are complex, both Chongzhen's personal reasons, as well as the reasons of Ming courtiers, and more financial pressure). The Ming Dynasty eventually abandoned Mongolia and Korea, and the Qing Dynasty had no worries.
The Qing Dynasty was quite generous in its co-optation of the Mongol nobility, the Qing Dynasty treated Korea as a suzerainty to vassal states, while Mongolia was more like an equal ally, and the Qing Dynasty set up the Mongolian Eight Banners on the basis of the Eight Banners of Manchuria, so that the nobles of the Mongolian tribes enjoyed almost the same treatment as the Manchurian nobles.
These policies slowly dismantled the Mongol tribes, and by the time the Qing Dynasty entered the border, Eastern Mongolia had completely submitted to the rule of the Qing Dynasty and assisted the Qing Dynasty in invading the lands of the Ming Dynasty.
But as the Qing Dynasty became stronger and stronger, the Mongol nobility also began its own path of expansion, and in the Mongolian Plateau, and now the Inner Mongolia region, simply put, the vast land north of the Ming Great Wall, there were three voices:
One was to restore genghis Khan's glory and establish another Mongol Empire;
One is to obey the rule of the Qing government and enjoy the preferential treatment given by the Qing government;
There is also a species called wall head grass.
After the Qing Dynasty destroyed the Southern Ming dynasty and gained most of the territory of the Ming Dynasty, the Dzungar Khanate was also established, and the area ruled by this khanate was not the whole of Mongolia, but the vast land of western Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Qinghai, etc., in the central and eastern parts of the Mongolian plateau, still within the rule of the Qing Dynasty.
Also because of the difference in such geographical areas, the fighting sites of the Qing Dynasty and the Dzungar Khanate were not in the north, but in the west, in Shaanxi, Ningxia, and Shanxi.
Because the areas of conquest are different, the Qing Dynasty did not care too much about the original Ming Great Wall, but if it took great effort to build the Ming Great Wall, it would definitely arouse the vigilance of the Eastern Mongolian nobles, if these Mongolian nobles became vassals of the Dzungars, the Qing Dynasty would face the dilemma of simultaneous war in the western north, which the Qing Dynasty did not want to see.
After the establishment of the Dzungar Khanate, it always wanted to compete with the Qing Dynasty, so both the Dzungar Khanate and the Qing Dynasty focused on the eastern Mongol nobles, which is extremely clear in the TV series Kangxi Empire.
Both sides were expanding their influence through co-optation and force, and the spheres of influence of both sides in Mongolia were lost and many battles were fought north of the Great Wall.
The confrontation between the Qing Dynasty and the Dzungar Khanate began to be known in the middle of the Kangxi Dynasty, and the Kangxi Emperor, with his great strength and clever diplomatic means, successively co-opted the Heshuo Khanate in the Qinghai region of Tibet and slowly freed them from the control of the Dzungar Khanate.
Then, through peace, the vigilance of the Khan Kaldan of the Dzungar Khanate was broken, and then, five consecutive attacks on the Dzungar Khanate, although it also suffered several major defeats, but overall, the Qing Dynasty had the upper hand, and after Kaldan's death, the strength of the Dzungar Khanate was greatly weakened, leaving only the central and western parts of Xinjiang.
However, the Kangxi Emperor's five conquests of Dzungar only pushed the front from Ningxia and Shaanxi to the west to eastern Xinjiang, the whole of Mongolia was completely under the control of the Qing government, and the Dzungars also wanted to fight back, they avoided fighting with the main force of the Qing army, but sent troops to invade Tibet, the Qing army launched a counterattack, the first time lost, the second time won.
During the Yongzheng period and the Qianlong period, the Dzungar Khanate revived many times, and even expanded to the whole of Xinjiang, and burned the war to the Shaanxi area of Ningxia, and the Yongzheng Emperor appointed the famous general Yue Zhongqi as the governor of Sichuan and Shaanxi, and launched a counterattack on Dzungar, which finally curbed the Dzungar offensive.
It was not until the Qianlong period that the Qing Dynasty took advantage of the civil unrest in Dzungar that it destroyed the Dzungar Khanate and ended the nearly hundred-year conquest between the Qing Dynasty and the Dzungar Khanate.
It can be seen that the Hundred Years' War between the Qing Dynasty and the Dzungars, the focus of the war was in the west, most of them were outside the Great Wall, and the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty was of no use at all. After the fall of the Dzungar Khanate, the Qing Dynasty had no opponents, and during this period, the Qing Dynasty also built some Great Walls, but these Great Walls were only to prevent the Han people in the Central Plains from migrating to the northeast and destroying the foundations of the Qing Dynasty. Because of the short-sightedness of the Qing government, the northeast was not effectively developed for hundreds of years, and in the end, it cheapened the Russians.