For the History.com, I wrote about a question with an obvious initial answer that gets more interesting the deeper you dig:
With more than 13,000 miles of human-made and natural barriers, the Great Wall of China was constructed and reconstructed over the course of more than two millennia. The wall represents the vision, planning and hard labor of millions of people, from emperors and senior civil servants to the soldiers, peasants and prisoners who pounded earth and laid brick and stone to build its barriers.
Carlos Rojas, a professor of Chinese cultural studies at Duke University and the author of The Great Wall: A Cultural History, says that the individual leaders most responsible for the Great Wall as we know it today might include a nation-unifying emperor from the third century B.C., a border-fortifying Ming Dynasty sovereign or even a late-20th-century Communist modernizer. But, he says, “the best answer to the question of who built the Great Wall of China is that it is the result of countless overlapping efforts and has no single creator.”