David Frye > Quotes

“Alexander, Gog, and Magog. The emergence of the Wall as an international symbol had resulted from many of those same forces that had elsewhere led to the colonization of the Americas. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Wall drew the attention of Jesuit missionaries to China. The Jesuits were never especially successful at converting the Chinese to Christianity. However, they dazzled the imperial court with novelties of Western manufacture—pumps, clocks, sextants, telescopes, cannons, even steam-powered automobiles—and in turn the Jesuits were dazzled by the Great Wall of the Ming. To Father Verbiest”
― David Frye, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick