page_title: Chinese city wall
section_title: Composition
hierarchical_section_title: Chinese city wall / Composition
caption_attribution_description: 中文: 绍兴迎恩门，自西侧望城门和水门。
context_page_description: Chinese city walls refer to defensive systems used to protect towns and cities in China in pre-modern times. In addition to walls, city defenses often included towers and gates.
context_section_description: Chinese city walls tended to be rectangular or square in shape. Philosophical and even feng shui considerations were adopted in siting gates, towers, and the city itself. Chinese cities were rarely centered on a castle. Instead, the city's administrative center was spread over a relatively large area, which may or may not have been surrounded by a second set of "inner" walls similar in shape and construction to the main outer wall.
  Long-term strategic considerations meant that the walls of important cities often enclosed an area much larger than existing urban areas in order to ensure excess capacity for growth, and to secure resources such as timber and farmland in times of war. The city wall of Quanzhou in Fujian still contained one quarter vacant land by 1945. The city wall of Suzhou by the Republic of China era still enclosed large tracts of farmland. The City Wall of Nanjing, built during the Ming dynasty, enclosed an area large enough to house an airport, bamboo forests, and lakes in modern times.
caption: Ying'en Gate of Shaoxing, showing both entrances of a combined land-and-water gate
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