THE GREAT WALL  BY WILLIAM LINDESAY Ordinarily I might have paused to catch my breath, but hiking up to the Great Wall of China is never an ordinary affair.
	WALL ON THE WILDSIDE BY WILLIAM LINDESAY The Great Wall of China is one of the world's largest and most famous man-made structures, yet vast sections of it lie virtually abandoned. William Lindesay on the delights of ‘Wild Wall'
	WALKING THE WALL Forget the clichéd images: up close the Great Wall of China is simply astonishing. By Sally Webb
	THE LATE GREAT WALL THE GREAT WALL of China can’t quite match the myths that have grown up around it. Still, the truth is astonishing enough.

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The World's Greatest Destinations – 50 Places of a Lifetime

Special Collector's Issue NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER of October 1999

THE GREAT WALL

BY WILLIAM LINDESAY

Ordinarily I might have paused to catch my breath, but hiking up to the Great Wall of China is never an ordinary affair. Its silhouetted battlements running along the skyline spur me on. Sweating, straining, I'm injected with new enthusiasm when I spot bricks from the wall lying at the side of the rocky path, weighing perhaps 30 pounds each. I press on, doubtless in the footsteps of the army of builders who carried and levered the wall up – brick by brick, block by block – from 1,200 feet below. Then, instead of getting lighter as expected,

the horizon darkens: A 20-foot-high barrier of light gray stone confronts me, its massive blocks laid in straight course, perfectly interlocking. More than 2,000 pounds each, I estimate, and nine courses high. Insurmountable. An archway gives me the only access into this stronghold, and I climb steps onto the top of the wall, a stone highway stretching into the distance. From here I get a view down to the valley, my route, the builders' route. I wonder how the builders transported all the material, for I'm atop a 2,600-foot-high ridge, a formidable thing. Then nature paints over that logistical enigma with a pale pink sunlight, which illuminates a scene virtually unchanged for 430 years. My map-reading has been good: I am on a section of the “wild wall,” where nothing modern deforms the vista, not a power line or a road; there is only this ancient road of sorts, the Great Wall of China.

Quarried and baked from the mountains and earth that it crosses, rising along the line where traditional Chinese ways of life clashed against the free, roving ways of northern nomads, the Great Wall here complements nature, even enhances it. Before and behind me the glowing ramparts dominate the landscape for miles around. I know by the symbol on my map that the wall comes from where the sun rises and goes to where it sets. I am standing all alone, high up on the Great Wall,

with the whole day before me to walk along my very own section of the world's most spectacular open-air museum. I need no other vantage point to know the wall's true greatness: It is far more than history, far more than a landmard – it is part of the very geography of China, of Asia, of the world, and even beyond. BACK

CONDE Nast Traveller (UK edition DECEMBER 1999)

Wall on the wildside

BY WILLIAM LINDESAY

		The Great Wall of China is one of the world's largest and most famous man-made structures, yet vast sections of it lie virtually abandoned. William Lindesay on the delights of ‘Wild Wall' There is no sign of modern man in the vista; no smoke, not a pylon, let alone a road. But where there's a wall there's a way, and before us is an ancient roadway of sorts: the Great Wall of China, dipping and thrusting its way through this mountain range north of Beijing. And we are standing right on it,
surrounded at a distance by 1.28 billion Chinese, but not a single soul is anywhere within sight or sound.

We are far, far away from those tidy sections of Great Wall rebuilt for tourists and state leaders visiting China. This ‘wallscape' is natural, left to the ravages of time and, for now, beyond the reach of anyone without maps, motivation and muscle. It is Wild Wall: its pavement overgrown with bushes; some of it intact, some collapsed. We are hiking on history, walking along China's -- indeed, the world's -- most spectacular open-air museum; we are wild-walling. And by carrying provisions and the basic wherewithal for camping on our backs, we can continue for days.

I have been wild-walling for more than 12 years. The Great Wall lured me to China in 1986, and it has kept me there, enthralled and challenged, ever since. My fascination with walls began in the early 1980s with a mini-adventure along Hadrian's Wall. It was there that I contracted the condition that travel writer Alfred Wainwright, in one of his books on the Pennines, identified as ‘wall fever', a strong interest in the Roman wall being, in his opinion, ‘a healthy and rewarding pursuit'.

I planned my graduation from that 120km-long wall to the 2,500km main line of the Great Wall of China, an altogether more adult game, at a time when China was tentatively opening its door to the outside world. My journey was fraught with difficulties; large blisters and permanent aches turned out to be the least of my problems. China in 1987 was still 99.9 per cent closed to foreigners, and that meant my route was almost entirely off limits. However, I managed to trek along the Wall, built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and was eventually recognized as the first foreigner to make a solo journey of the entire Wall from its western terminus, Jiayuguan, to its seaside end, Shanhaiguan. And as I stood on the section of the Wall that snaked down the final mountain, across the coastal plain and down to the Yellow Sea, I realized that although my 2,470km trek was about to end, my interest in the Great Wall was only just beginning. The Great Wall, I had learned, was not an object, but a subject.

Looking back now, it is a trip I would recommend only to my worst enemies. But wild-walling around Beijing? Now that's a different matter. In recent years, I have derived far more enjoyment from a systematic exploration of every section and segment of Wild Wall around the capital and from sharing the thrill with other enthusiasts of Beijing's very special great outdoors.

The Beijing Region is about the size of Wales. According to remote-sensing surveys, it has around 629km of extant Great Wall. All of this is concentrated in the northern half, the mountainous region that was bolstered as a defensive front by Wall construction to protect the capital of Beijing from Mongol attack.

Ancient military strategy ensured that what remains of this Great Wall is spectacular. Builders of the Wall routed it along high ridges so that the defensive capacity of their work was accentuated by nature; thus the Wall is visible from miles around. Looking both ways, it snakes and slithers like a giant serpent to each horizon. From the air (all flights from Europe approach Beijing from the north, flying above the Wall for about 10 to 15 minutes before landing) the zigzagging ramparts look truly surreal, leading one to believe that it really can be seen from space. But what really makes the Wall stand out among the world's wonders is that its castellated symbol is featured on maps, making it part of the very geography of north China.

It is a geography well within reach of Beijing, which nestles just below the Wall. The wallscape is barely 100km away from the Chinese capital, and by penetrating it you can escape a population approaching 14 million and travel back in time to the Ming Dynasty. After four centuries of silence, the architectural and archaeological features all around are ready to whisper, speak, even shout their secrets to any hiker who will give some passing thought to what they see. For example, the tongue-like water spouts suggest that draining water off the Wall's pavement was crucial to its good maintenance, while the fact that these protrusions only stick out from the south side (the ‘inside') tells us that architects were unwilling to give invaders any helping handhold in scaling the ramparts. Fragments of coarse pottery in a watchtower remind us that we are atop an 800-metre-high ridge where water needed to be store. And a huge slab – four of us could barely budge it – engraved with more than 260 Chinese characters records the names of military officials responsible for ‘border defence' and gives brief mention to some low-ranking officers in charge of brick-baking, timber, mortar and the provisioning of the troops. The millions of labourers get no mention at all.

Their epitaph is what we are hiking on: the most time-and material-consuming, labour-intensive building project in human history. Sucked into a time-trance by its heady antiquarian atmosphere, you inevitably ask what it was all for; the answer, at the time, was ‘the Mongols'. In the 13^th century, tribes of skilled horsemen united under Genghis Khan began their sweep south into China, where their kind remained for around 150 years. Finally ousted in the late 1360s by the native Han Chinese, the Mongols nevertheless remained a threat. It was because of this threat that the Ming emperors began building their Great Wall, the most sophisticated and complex of all China's defensive walls built over three millennia. Each brick was baked, each block of rock quarried, to stop the Mongol horsemen from re-conquering China. And that must make the Chinese Wall equally an epitaph to the might of the Mongol.

So much for history; what of the Wall's future? As the position of the engraved tablet lying below the Wall showed, relics thieves had made a stab at carting off a valuable chunk of Great Wall history. And while the occasional visitor might help him or herself to a brick as a souvenir – most are put off by the 14kg weight – the greatest danger to the Wall is the burgeoning tourism industry. Badaling, which in turn-of-the-century photographs shows itself to be a prime wall section with magnificent vistas was, on account of its proximity and accessibility to Beijing, earmarked for mass tourist development back in the 1950s. Tackily restored, accessed by an expressway and with cable cars, kitsch and karaoke to boot, ‘Badalingisation' robs the Wall of its greatness. Alas, tourism needs its sites, and it has them in Badaling and Mutianyu, which after all was good enough for Clinton on his recent visit. Let it stay that way.

But will it? As I scan the horizon all around, there is an eerie, almost portentous silence in knowing what lies just out of sight: a rapidly reforming China in which the buzzword is development. Originally built to keep out the northern barabarians, the Great Wall, miraculously, has survived war, earthquakes and the decay of the centuries – even, on account of its remoteness, destruction by vandalistic Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when Mao sanctioned the ransacking of things historical. However, I fear the Wall may be about to face its greatest onslaught yet. It cannot be long before other sections of the Wall become exploited by tourism or wealthy entrepreneurs. It is true, tourists with cameras won't damage a Wall that has stood up to fierce attack, but tourism's attendant infrastructure – car parks, restaurants and hotels – certainly will. Without that wild, empty backdrop, the Wall will lose its grandeur. 

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Walking the Wall 

Most sightseers experience a sanitized (but still fascinating) version of the wall – reconstructed, with an unhealthy dose of tourist infrastructure – at the most accessible points at Badaling and Mutianyu, close to Beijing's northern fringe. We are more privileged: three people on our own, in a country of 1.3 billion. The wall we see is wild and wonderful. It is not just an object in the landscape: it's a landscape in itself. This is as spectacular as travel can be.

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THE LATE GREAT WALL

A wonder of the world is vanishing, unable to resist the destructive forces of nature and economics. What can be done to save it? A tour of the ruins.

BY MELINDA LIU

THE GREAT WALL of China can’t quite match the myths that have grown up around it. Still, the truth is astonishing enough. The Chinese call it the Long Wall of 10,000Miles-an exaggeration, even though its actual length would stretch from Paris to Karachi. The wall wasn’t built 2,000years ago, as some sources claim, and yet a few parts are centuries older. In fact, it’s really not a single wall at all, but a tangle of parallel and proximate fortifications. The pieces weren’t organized into a unified system until the Ming dynasty,

which lasted from 1368 to 1644. And one more quibble: it’s not visible from the moon.

The sad part is, less and less of it is visible from earth. The Great Wall is vanishing, unable to withstand the destructive  forces of nature and economics as deserts, development and tourists spread across China. This yeas the New York-based World Monuments Fund added the wall to its “most endangered sites” list. “It’s harder for really well-known sites to be selected because there’s skepticism as to whether they really need help,” observes Bonnie Burnham, the group’s president. Truth is, the wall needs urgent help-but where to start? “It’s difficult to protect because there’s so much of it ”, says William Lindesay, a British preservationist who is trying to rescue at least part of the untouched “wild wall” and its spectacular natural landscape near Beijing. He calls the project “the largest single cultural-relics-protection challenge in the world.”

The upcoming 2008 Olympics have made cultural preservation a particularly hot issue in Beijing. China desperately wants to put on its best face for the occasion. Unfortunately, Chinese authorities often think the way to look good is by tearing down old buildings and putting up shiny new ones. Nearly two decades ago China’s then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping launched a national campaign under the slogan “Love your country, rebuild the Great Wall.” By that point, the local press estimated, two thirds of the vast national symbol had been reduced to rubble by centuries of war, weather and peasant farmers’ mining its bricks to build homes and pigsties. Some Chinese think the rebuilders should have left bad enough alone.

    The first stretch of wall to be rebuilt was at Badaling, in the hills roughly 72km north-west of Beijing.  Zhang Jianxin, an official of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, recalls how unspoiled the area was in 1979, when he took a weeklong bike tour nearby and encountered wolves. Today the site is part theme park, part carnival and part shopping mall, managed by a corporation that is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The area around the wall is packed with tour buses, T-shirt vendors, souvenir ”ride camel” photo stands and a huge, grinning likeness of Colonel Sanders clutching an oversize bucket of fried chicken. Zhang tries not to go anywhere near the place now. “It’s lost sense of history,” he says.

     The mandarins of Beijing didn’t seem to mind. The place was a money machine. Next they renovated another section of “tourist wall” 97km northeast of Beijing at Mutianyu. Sightseers can ride a cable car to the wall’s crest and swoosh back down the hillside on toboggans. Not surprisingly, when Harvard University’s president, Larry Summers , visited a stretch of the wall near Beijing in May, he sounded more than a little concerned. “Go-kart rides, Disneyland-type scenes and golden arches,” he said with a sigh to NEWSWEEK. “Is this good?”

     Good or bad, modern times have hit the wall-and not only around Beijing. Some 320km northeast of the capital, the wall’s eastern terminus, the Old Dragon’s Head, rises from the sea. You can still see a few fragments of the wall’s ancient foundation there, enshrined in weather-beaten glass cases atop the reduilt wall. What stands on the site now is a reconstruction erected in the late 1980s. The original Dragon’s Head was demolished by European expeditionary forces in 1900. These days along the wall near Shanhaiguan you run a gantlet of aggressive hawkers brandishing trinkets and offering to take your picture dressed as an emperor or a modern Chinese Army general. On the grounds of the Old Dragon’s Head,  passengers ride “the Dragon Boat,” an amusement-park attraction that rocks back and forth at increasingly sharp angles until the keel is perpendicular to the ground.

    But tacky tourism isn’t the most serious threat besieging the wall. It’s indifference-that of impoverished locals who seek to eke out a living from hikers and “wall walkers,” and that of county authorities who are always willing to tack a bribe and look the other way when locals violate the few existing preservation laws. In fact, most of the wall is unrestored  “wild wall,” as Lindesay and other preservationists call it. Imperial history still resonates through the crumbling bricks, tangled undergrowth and pristine natural settings of these dilapidated but majestic sites. The question is how much longer they can survive. Wherever hikers stop on the wall , they are increasingly likely to find litter, graffiti and peasant-operated tourist traps. One of  the most spectacular sites, roughly 64km north of Beijing, is the village of Huanghuacheng, where a crumbling 500-year-old watch-tower now houses a soft-drink stand.    

On a recent summer afternoon, villagers stood on the roof of the tower setting off firecrackers and cherry bombs. Selling fireworks is a favorite way to coax money from wall walkers. After a series of earsplitting explosions, the men found they had ignited some dry grass growing on the ancient structure.
They danced around giggling, stamping out the flames on top of the ancient tower. A little farther on, farmers have set up u8nauthorized “ticket booths” and ladders to extract entrance fees. One local man has bolted a crude metal door to a tower’s archway, creating  a private room where he can rest when he’s not taking admissions.

    Still, the damage is relatively minor around Huanghuacheng . In the backcountry, far from Beijing’s oversight, progress is the only priority. Three years ago, in Inner Mongolia, highway builders demolished part of a sentry-post wall dating back more than 2,200 years. Authorities from the local cultural-relics bureau tried to intervene, but were overruled by the powerful Communications Department in charge of highways. “Because the Great Wall is very precious, we had conflicts with the communications bureau at the time ,” admits Li Fu, head of the cultural-relics bureau, “but we had to let the wall be damaged because Highway 110 is a very important national project , running from eastern China to Tibet,” In the end, the cultural-relics crowd had to settle for digging up and preserving some ancient copper coins left by troops who camped  near the outpost some 2,000 years ago.

    To the west the wall faces a threat more powerful than Beijing bureaucrats- Mother Nature. Some parts of the ancient structure have entirely disappeared beneath the sands of the expanding Gobi Desert. The parched wasteland is advancing all across northern China, thanks to decades of overgrazing, dropping water tables and reckless land use. Unlike the Ming-era wall built of stone and brick, the even more ancient wall in western China is made of rammed earth that has disintegrated under centuries of wind, sandstorms and flash flooding.

    No one has any magic recipes for saving the wall. Beijing has some cultural-relics regulations to protect the roughly 640km in its direct6 jurisdiction, but no one seems to enforce them. The fact that all commercial structures are banned within a half kilometer or so of the wall has not kept entrepreneurs in Huanghuacheng from putting up several restaurants, a modern hotel complex and even a mobile-phone repeater station right on top of an ancient watchtower. What’s Beijing doing about it? Writing more laws.

   Some of the wall’s problems are beyond human legislation and modern technology. One of its oldest standing fragments is a rammed- earth barricade some 46m long and 3.6m high at Yumenguan, Gansu province, not far from the wall’s western tip. The ancient builders used a kind of adobe made from soil, straw, tamarisk, egg yolk and rice paste. Now it’s disintegrating, and no one can repair it. “We no longer know how,” says Luo Zhewen, one of China’s foremost wall experts. “We just cannot meet the old standards.”

Nearby, the 630- year- old fortress at Jiayuguan rises out of the desert like a mirage against the snowcapped Qilian Mountains. Caretakers thought they knew a way to patch its crumbling brick walls to make them stronger than ever. “We thought cement was good because it was a modern invention,” says a local tour guide. “But it was too heavy for the original materials. The repaired portion collapsed.” Perhaps to distract visitors from the damage, someone has draped the walls in Christmas lights.

  Despite all the obstacles, Lindesay is determined to save the wild wall at least. He fell in love with it 15 years ago when he hiked 4,000km along its expanse, defying illness, blisters, dogs and local authorities. Lindesay calls it “the world’s largest open-air museum without a curator.” As head of the International Friends of the Great Wall, he organizes regular cleanup drives and educational campaigns. Just last week he signed an agreement with Beijing municipal authorities and UNESCO to help protect the wild wall and its natural setting. By designating special protection zones, he hopes to convince local officials that the wall is not just a structure but a unique landscape, requiring careful management and what he calls “stewardship.”

  It’s a tough sell. Most Chinese see the wall merely as the country’s biggest tourist attraction, while others remain profoundly ambivalent about their national treasure. To them the wall stands for feudal oppression as much as it represents cultural pride. Tradition says China’s first emperor, the despotic Qin Shihuang, worked laborers to death by the tens of thousands in erecting a barricade against the “barbarians” of present-day northern China. Some members of today’s older generation saw him as a model for the tyranny of Mao Zedong. Others have never forgotten the popular lullaby about Meng Chiang, a Han-dynasty woman whose husband died of hunger while working on the wall. After he was buried beneath its ramparts, the song says, she cried until it collapsed.

  The preservationists hope young Chinese will eventually learn to love the wall. Rightly or not, nothing else in China inspires such awe in the eyes of Westerners. China likes to pretend it doesn’t care what foreigners think. Didn’t the ancient emperors build the wall in order to keep out the meddlesome barbarians? It didn’t work. Wave after wave of invaders, from the Mongols to the Manchus, swept past the wall as if it didn’t exist. Today people fly halfway around the world just to see it. China might also benefit from taking a fresh look.

               With PAUL MOONEY and JUNE SHIH

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