In one of the earliest legends, [I 005 / Qin Shi Huang's] wall of 221BC took 20 years using 300,000 troops and all the criminals in China, not to mention a fair number of literati. When the wall was finished, a million men had worked on it and so difficult was the task that many reputedly died. Their corpses, it is said, were thrown into the wall, giving rise to the macabre phrase: `the Wall is the longest cemetery in the world.'
Probably the same story but from a different angle is the one that says the emperor ordered every third working man to participate in the building of the wall without payment. In this version the wall was finished in five years and stood for the next 2,000 years.
