Editing Northern Wei (section)

=== Building the Great Wall ===
To resist the threats posed by the [[Rouran]]s, Northern Wei emperors started to embark on building its own [[Great Wall]], the first since the Han dynasty. In 423, a defence line over 2,000 ''li'' ({{convert|1080|km}}) long was built; its path roughly followed the old [[Zhao (state)|Zhao]] wall from [[Chicheng]] County in Hebei Province to [[Wuyuan County, Inner Mongolia]].<ref>{{cite book | last = Lovell | first = Julia | author-link = Julia Lovell | title = The Great Wall : China against the world 1000 BC – 2000 AD | publisher = Picador Pan Macmillan | location = Sydney | year = 2006 | isbn = 978-0-330-42241-3 }}</ref> In 446, 100,000 men were put to work building an inner wall from [[Yanqing County|Yanqing]], passing south of the Wei capital [[Pingcheng]], and ending up near Pingguan on the eastern bank of the Yellow River. The two walls of Northern Wei formed the basis of the double-layered [[Xuanfu]]–[[Datong]] wall system that protected Beijing a thousand years later during the Ming dynasty.