Book review: The Great Wall in 50 Objects is a brilliant achievement of alternative history
William Lindesay has put a lifetime of knowledge into this quirky yet illuminating volume, a collage of the cultures that were arrayed on both sides of the Wall
by William Lindesay
Penguin
William Lindesay’s The Great Wall in 50 Objects is a quirky yet illuminating alternative history of China and its relationship to the nomadic peoples and territories of the north. It bears an obvious debt in concept and title to A History of the World in 100 Objects, the British Museum’s joint project with the BBC, acknowledgment of which is strangely buried deep in the final notes. A formula it may be, but it is an adaptable and winning one.
Lindesay has selected 50 different objects, from maps to bricks and weapons; rather than a coherent, single narrative, the result is a collage whose discontinuities and very unevenness illuminate history in an entirely different way. Only a particularly pedantic historian would, it seems to me, take issue with the approach.