张萍《Rise and Fall: Deciphering Urban Sites and their Environment in Overlapping Agrarian/Pastoral Regions》发表于《Social Sciences in China》No 3. 2010.

The area 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 Chinese. 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 way of life 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.