摘要
The area along the Grear Wall in northern Shaanxi between the Loess Plateau and the Ordos Desert is one of the major agrarian-pastoral regions of northwest China. Historically, the land was fought over by the nomadic and the agrarian peoples of the region. The Yansui section of the Ming Great Wall and thirty-nine fortified encampments along it were built during fighting between the Mongols and the Han people. As all of them were located along communication lines vital to economic development, they played an important role in politics, the economy and transport over three hundred years of Ming and Qing rule. However, they fell into disuse in the late Qing and the Republican period and are now in ruins. The main reason underlying their decline was that the sites had been chosen for their defensive value, so the subsequent northern expansion of China’s borders and structural changes in the border economy hastened their decline. Thus the rise and fall of these fortified towns at the intersection of the agrarian and the pastoral regions was closely related to imperial political and military activity and was in line with ethnic and tribal movements and migrations and the evolution of civilizations. In sum, the reasons behind the demise of these fortified towns and camps were highly complex and usually involved multiple factors.
陕北长城沿线属黄土高原与鄂尔多斯沙地交接地带,也是北方农牧交错地带,历史上经常是游牧民族与农耕民族争夺的地域。明延绥长城及沿线39营堡就是在蒙汉争战过程中构筑起来的。由于营堡与交通走廊互为一体,带动了经济发展,历明清两代三百多年,发挥了重要的政治、经济与交通中心作用。它的废毁是在晚清民国时期, 今天大多已沦为废城。究其原因,城址选择上过多考虑军事防守需要是主因,而边疆内地化及沿边经济结构变动加速了其衰亡。因此,北方农牧交错地带城堡的兴衰与王朝的政治、军事行动相关联,与民族、部落流转迁徙及文明演进过程相一致,其中的历史成因极其复杂,地址废弃往往是多方面因素造成的。
