WildWall
Experiences
2 Brothers RUN the entire Great Wall of China | Episode 1
2 Brothers Great Wall ｜Episode 2: The Legacy
2 Brothers Great Wall | Ep.3: Life On The Wall
PROLOGUE
WildWall is a family enterprise with one main aim:
—— to tell the Great Wall story the way we have discovered it.
WildWall originated in 1998 with the purchase of our farmhouse and the advent of the ‘WildWall Weekend’. It has evolved ever since. As I have explored more, researched more, published more, exhibited more, presented more, I’ve incorporated these new experiences and skills into contents and delivery of my story. Along the way, Wu Qi and I have raised our two sons James and Thomas as children of the outdoors. They entered, from 4 years old and birth respectively, into our family’s Great Wall passion, and have become increasingly involved in it up until now. From the ages of 6-7 years old they started to join our WildWall hikes. Every hike, even at dawn, requiring getting up and being ready to go by as early as 3 am to see summer sunrises.
They participated in end-to-end Great Wall journeys when occasions to do so were created, in part to celebrate, in part to learn a little more and see things more entirely. In 2007 they were part of our Jeep Safari along the whole length of the Wall, celebrating my the 20th anniversary of my successful journey along it. In 2010 and 2011 they accompanied me on my expedition to explore the ‘Walls of Genghis Khan’, in Mongolia. In 2016, celebrating my 30th anniversary of first arriving in China with my grand ambition, we travelled the length and breadth of the Wall to film it from the air, when drones had just come on the market. It was soon after that flight that I heard them talk between themselves about ‘coming back down to earth’…Next, please enjoy the press release that I wrote to announce the news of their great achievement …
PRESS RELEASE
British Brothers Claim Hat-Trick of Records along the Great Wall of China
Two British brothers have made a record-breaking 3,263 km journey on foot along the main west-to-east length of the Great Wall of China, 35 years after their father made the first traverse of the monumental landmark on foot by a foreigner.
James Lindesay and Thomas Lindesay, aged 28 and 21 years old respectively in July 2022 when they set off from the Taolai River near the Jiayuguan Fortress in northwest China’s Gansu Province, arrived at Old Dragon’s Head where the Great Wall meets the sea at Shanhaiguan in Hebei Province on November 22, becoming the first-known brothers and youngest athletes to succeed in making the monumental journey.
“According to our tracking app we’ve covered 3,263 kilometres during the 130 days since leaving Jiayuguan,” said James, the elder of the Lindesay brothers.
The brothers, who returned to their Beijing hometown on December 2, 2022 after being gridlocked by the chaotic implementation of Covid restrictions by local authorities in Liaoning Province describe themselves as being members of ‘a Great Wall family’.
Their father, William Lindesay, from Wallasey on Merseyside in the UK, first travelled to China in 1986 to embark on his solo adventure that marked just the start of a lifelong engagement with the Great Wall. In 1987 he made the first long distance traverse of the Great Wall by a foreigner on foot, covering 2,470 km. Two years later, in 1989, he recounted his experiences in the book ‘Alone on the Great Wall’. He has since written numerous books on the subject.
“During my father’s 1987 Great Wall adventure my future parents met in Beijing … I think my mother’s charms convinced my father to make China their home, and the Great Wall their life’s joint work, and that’s a passion that my brother and I have inherited,” explained Thomas. “We are ‘Wallnuts’.”
GREAT WALL PEDIGREE
Prior to their four-month-long Great Wall marathon the Lindesay brothers had already accrued “at least a thousand days’ of experiences on various parts of the Great Wall”. As children they spent the majority of their weekends at the family’s Wall-side farmhouse, assisting their father with the running of WildWall Weekends.
“Looking back, I had a ‘Wall-spent’ youth, walking, talking, photographing and picking garbage up from the Wall — for 30 weekends a year, year after year from the age of four!” said James.
In 2001 William Lindesay founded International Friends of the Great Wall to sustain an action and advocacy campaign to draw attention to the degradation of the Great Wall landscape’s environment. He has been widely recognised for his conservation efforts, receiving the Friendship Award from China in 1999, being appointed an OBE by HM Queen Elizabeth II in 2006, and being named a luminary member of ‘The Explorers Club 50, Class of 2022’.
In 2016, the Lindesay brothers spent the whole summer flying drones at scores of locations along the Great Wall. The project led to them to establish DEPICTOGRAPH, a startup production ‘company’ using just a MacBook Pro provided by Apple (China). A report and short video on BBC news was just a first success. Eventually their footage was used exclusively for the first internationally-broadcast documentaries to show the Great Wall from the air.
“We never thought that our footage would eventually become a stand-alone documentary, broadcast on the big channels like BBC and CCTV,” said James, who majored in history at Peking University.
STEPPING STONES
The Lindesay brothers decided to come down to earth for their next Great Wall journey.
“We wanted to see the Wall up-close, on foot all the way, and follow its line through every county, every province,” said James. “The only question in our minds became ‘when?”
In summer 2019 the brothers decided on the year for their planned expedition — 2022.
Back in Britain, their preparations included the gruelling ‘Three Peaks Challenge’ (Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon, being the three highest mountains in Scotland, England and Wales respectively) in 18.5 hours, and trail races in the Lake District, Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia. But it was on a three-day run along the 120-km length of Hadrian’s Wall during a rare British heatwave when they decided on 2022 as their year for the Great Wall journey.
Back in Beijing the brothers ramped up their training. As well as long distance running, walking and gym workouts and Spartan obstacle-course racing events, some for as long as 60 hours in duration, non-stop, without any sleep or rest.
“I learned about ‘choosing hard over easy’ and decided to set off right after my graduation,” said Thomas, who studied International Relations at Peking University.
GRADUATION DAY PLEDGE
Twenty-one year-old Tommy defiantly announced the brothers’ expedition plan during a speech he was chosen to deliver at his Peking University graduation ceremony in July 2022— despite China’s state of limbo, with everything seemingly being shelved until ‘after the Congress’ or ‘when Covid’s over’.
“We were determined not to delay for a single day, for anything,” stressed James.
In this respect, the perseverance of their father proved to be a great inspiration.
“Our father dealt with an almost totally-closed China of the mid 1980s — so we just prepared ourselves to do the same. His fugitive stories of trespassing through closed areas are now well known. He was arrested nine times and deported for 'repeated trespass in areas closed to foreigners’ but he managed to outwit and outrun his pursuers most of the time, changed his passport, re-entered China and battled on to achieve an incredible feat. It was a life-changing journey for him — and for the future of the Great Wall.”
TEAM SUPPORT
The Lindesay brothers set off from the west end of the Ming Dynasty Great Wall, at Jiayuguan in Gansu Province, with two support vehicles and old Great Wall family friends, Yang Xiao and Piao Tiejun. The first 700 km of the journey was a baptism of fire.
“July and August were tough. Temperatures hit 38 degrees. Gobi desert conditions were sizzling, the air suffocating, but our biggest problem was man made — the provincial health code app of Gansu was not designed to work for foreigners.’’ At the time, so-called ‘Green Health codes’ on smartphones were essential digital passports for anyone in China to enter a shop, restaurant or hotel, or any other public place.
“So our solution was to be nomadic, to camp — our crew provided all the support we needed,” said Thomas, “and friendly farmers, fed up with the crippling economic effect of covid policies sold us juicy melons and the best tomatoes we’ve ever tasted.”
Along the way, the brothers managed to add a 2022 edit to a legendary friendship page of the family’s Great Wall history.
“We visited a Wall-side family in Shandan, Gansu, who sheltered our Dad in April 1987,” recalled James. “He wrote about their individual implementation of the government’s ‘open-door’ policy of 1980s China in his newly-published Great Wall memoir, which we carried to gift to the Yin couple as a token of the enduring nature of the Great Wall friendship between our two families across two generations and spanning five decades.”
XENOPHOBIA
However, the brothers’ reception along many parts of their route wasn’t always so hospitable.
“People turned the other way at the sight of us strangers, and often ignored our requests for necessities. We asked them why? and the repeated answers were ‘because you’re outsiders’.”
After hugging the line of the Wall in Gansu they crossed the Yellow River in Ningxia and entered Shaanxi. As temperatures moderated, the brothers increased their daily mileage from around 30 km to more than 40 km per day.
“Our daily regime was 1,500 metres’ running, followed by 500 metres’ walking. We aimed to cover two-thirds of our mileage before lunch, then we’d put our feet up for a couple of hours, before hitting the trail again to top up our mileage in late afternoon. We had one rest day each week, and an extended rest of a few days every few weeks,” explained Thomas.
According to James, the running plan proved itself to be “almost perfect’, as the athletes only experienced ‘a few twinges of knee pain’ and ‘one bout of a cold’ and ‘not a single blister’ during the duration of their expedition. “We put that down to advance and dedicated preparations and a very sound daily plan which incorporated strategic frequency of rest days’ and of course, the right shoes.”
In total the brothers used 13 pairs of shoes between them.
Compared to their father’s run of 1987, the brothers utilised technologies that were truly a century ahead.
“We had a detailed digital map that my father could only dream about,” said Thomas.
The brothers plotted their precise daily route using a digital map on a MacBook Pro each evening at camp. The map was sourced from the national Ming Great Wall survey that took place from 2004-2007, which reveal the existing remains of the Ming Wall to be 8,851 km in total length.
Their maximum daily mileage was 68 km — but not by choice.
BANDIT AUTHORITIES
“We entered a county in Shanxi where the arbitrary and illegal anti-covid measures resulted in the closure of roads, restaurants and inns to all people from other counties — so we just crossed the county non-stop, in one day, from the crack of dawn to late at night, completely self-sufficient, until we emerged on the other side!”
For the first 2 months of the journey, the morphology of the Great Wall ruins that they followed are made of rammed earth. Only when they reached Hebei Province did they meet the stone- and brick-clad Great Wall that is familiar to people the world over.
“On one morning in Hebei we hiked about 10 km and passed through so many watchtowers that we could not keep count of them,” recalled James.
By late October the Lindesay brothers approached Jiankou, where the family’s farmhouse is located, and where parents William and Wu Qi, and James’ wife Huiting, stood awaiting the adventurers’ arrival.
“It was incredible to know that they had followed the line of the Wall all the way from Jiayuguan in the west, that’s about 2,400 km away from our front gate — without missing a centimetre of land!” said William.
A surprise lay in store for the brothers while resting up for a few days at their own Wall-side home. Archeologist Shang Heng led an ascent of the Jiankou Wall with a difference, sharing his knowledge of recent discoveries. Expert Li Chunyu made a rubbing of a recently unearthed stele which dates construction of the Wall at Jiankou to the Wanli period of the late 1500s.
Beyond Beijing it was back into eastern Hebei Province to face a relentless barrage of ‘covid related problems’. Their support crew had ‘pop-up red codes’, which proved unsolvable. With winter fast approaching, the brothers had to decide whether to wait for a solution, or go.
“We opted to go it alone, but had to take equipment that would enable us to sleep out and cook for ourselves as we passed through ‘hostile areas’.
The brothers purchased a baby stroller, and literally set off on the final push, through Hebei to where the Wall meets the sea at Shanhaiguan.
They arrived at Old Dragon’s Head on the shoreline of the Bohai Gulf on the afternoon of November 22, taking photos on the beach with the Great Wall behind them, just as their father had done 35 years before.
In reaching the seaside terminus of the Great Wall, the brothers lay claim to achieving three milestones.
They are the first brothers to make such a Great Wall journey.
Thomas Lindesay is the youngest person (21) to make such a journey.
The Lindesays of two generations are the first to have made successive journeys along the main-line of the Ming Wall.
Commenting on the achievement of his sons, William Lindesay said: “To make a journey of thousands of kilometres along the Great Wall is a monumental achievement — at anytime. But to have done so during 2022, when China was a troubled land of blocked roads, closed-off villages, locked-down towns and cities, elevates the scale of their achievement to a higher level, for their battling against the seemingly impossible. I am immeasurably proud to say I’m the father of men who have made such an achievement at such an age, during these ‘difficult times’.”
Postscript, Summer 2023
— From the ‘Seaside Terminus of the Wall’ to the True Eastern End at Dandong
The Lindesay brothers had picked up two stones from the west end of the Wall and on setting off from there had vowed to carry them all the way to the eastern end of the Wall, which is at Tiger mountain, near Dandong in Liaoning Province.
Determined to complete their pledge they set off from Huludao in Liaoning, where they had paused their journey in November of 2022. When they arrived at Dandong a few weeks later, parents William Lindesay and Wu Qi were there to mark a fabulous first in the annals of the Lindesay family and the Great Wall.
The brothers duly took out the stones they had carried every centimetre of the way along the line of the Great Wall from Jiayuguan and threw them off the Wall, into a buffer zone that marks the border between China and North Korea.