[suspenseful magical music]
[dramatic music]
I'm now more
than 230 miles west
of the fortress of Jiayuguan.
I'm here in the Kumtag Desert.
It's one of the
harshest environments
I've ever been in in my life.
Very little grows here.
The temperatures are
literally below freezing.
It's a hell of a place to
imagine finding archeology.
Sarah's guiding me to
faint traces of what
looks like an even
older wall that she
spotted on the satellite data.
[epic adventurous music]
If I get up here, I think
I can get my first glimpse.
Wow, this is cool.
And it's not exactly
what I expected.
And it looks kind of primitive.
I want to see more.
I want to get up closer.
Here, in the middle of nowhere,
a stretch of ancient wall.
And it looks very different
from anything I've seen so far.
This is a very distinctive
kind of material.
We have rammed earth, packed
down, with a reed foundation.
These are reeds.
This is actually a
type of thick grass
pressed in there to
serve as a foundation
to hold the wall stable.
This framework is
an ingenious way
of building even with the
desert's loose sand and gravel.
But if the Ming didn't
build this, then who did?
To find out, I'm meeting Jang
Joon Min, the head of a team
from the Gansu Institute
of Relics and Archaeology,
who are digging for answers.
Wow, this is so cool.
Tell me what you have here.
[non-english speech]
TRANSLATOR: These are two
arrowheads we found nearby.
One is bronze, and one is iron.
You can see, it's still sharp.
I've never seen this shape
to an arrowhead before.
You know, where it's basically
three-sided like this.
Is that common?
[non-english speech]
TRANSLATOR: We found lots
of these along the wall
in this area.
These arrowheads are very
typical of the Han Dynasty.
[mysterious music]
[dramatic music]
1,500 years before the Ming,
before the Roman Empire formed
in the West and Cleopatra
ruled Ancient Egypt,
the Han Dynasty rose to power.
They oversaw a golden
age of art, culture,
and economic prosperity.
They're so well preserved.
I'm just amazed.
Look at that edge.
It's just incredible.
The form is just so
clear and beautiful.
These tiny arrowheads
reveal something momentous--
that the wall here is
more than 2,000 years old.
It's an even earlier Great
Wall of China that once
stretched for over 6,000 miles.
Much of the famous
Ming Dynasty wall
was simply built right
on top 1,500 years later.
Battered by desert winds
for over two millennia, what
remains of this ancient
stretch of Great Wall
are just fragments of what
was once a mighty barrier.
It's kind of hard, just looking
at these ruined sections
of the wall, to get a sense of
what it looked like originally.
So using historical sources
and archaeological evidence,
we've made this
pretty phenomenal
digital reconstruction
of what the wall
might have looked like.
It's just amazing.
Whoa.
Look at that.
[dramatic music]
When it was first
built, the wall would
have stood up to 20 feet high.
This thing was enormous.
I can only imagine being part
of an invading nomad army,
and coming up against
this wall, and thinking,
maybe it's better
to just go home,
because this was formidable.
