In June 1644 the Ming Dynasty fell after ruling China for 276 years. So too ended the national strategy of building long defensive structures (Great Wall) and thus the ramparts were left to the ravages of nature, man and time.

Hardly had the Wall’s towers been vacated by their garrisoning men were wooden doors and window shutters removed from towers.

Within a few years weeds were sprouting up between its paving stones.

After a decade or so the wind blown loess from the north had formed a thin soil, soon colonized by seeds borne on the wind.

Shrubs and saplings grew, their roots prizing the fill of the Wall apart. Deluges exploited the channels, saturating the fill with moisture, rotting its mortar and freezing in winter in the troughs it collected.

Foundation blocks were forced out by freeze-thaw expansion.

Light tremors shook the structure every few years. Stronger ones came centuries apart, the last in 1976, epicentred on Tangshan, just south of the ramparts in eastern Hebei.

As the centuries passed the forces of nature slowly reclaimed a building --  Great Wall -- and changed it into wilderness Great Wall (Wild Wall), overgrown and crumbling, telling the passage of time, each earthquake, each storm, each winter.

This was the species of Great Wall I saw in 1987 as I trekked for 2,470km across northern China following the route of the Ming Dynasty ramparts Wall. Yet when I talked about such experiences in the wake of the 1989 publication of my book (Alone on the Great Wall) in which I recounted my experiences, I realized that most people imagined my journey to have been along the kind of Wall that was typically chosen to illustrate guide books and encyclopaedias – Great Wall rebuilt for tourism. For this reason I felt the need to coin a new term to capture the essence of the history I had hiked upon. Thus the term “Wild Wall” came into being.

Exactly a decade later, as I hiked up to a section of Great Wall about 100km north of Beijing on December 31st 1999, I remember looking up to the faint outlines of watchtowers silhouetted by starlight on the ridge, and thinking how many turns of centuries the ancient sentinels had witnessed.
They had seen the arrival of 1700, 1800 and 1900. Within half an hour of these thoughts they would oversee the arrival of 2000…

The Great Wall first attracted my attention during early childhood --- circa 1968 -- when I became fascinated by seeing its unique symbol on a map of China. Years later, the long-dormant dream of one day exploring it came alive at Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman-built wall in the north of England. And so I conceived the ambitious idea of making a journey on foot along the entire length of the structure. Since that moment my life has been dominated by this wonder of the world: the Great Wall brought me to China, has kept me there for fifteen years, and will always keep me here, given the amount of research and conservation work that needs to be done.

This is my personal website and it summarizes my career to date on the Great Wall, provides some basic knowledge gained from my experiences (now approaching 1,200 days on Great Wall in various places), displays some of my photographs and recounts some of the experiences and introduces the services that I now offer.