The Wall

May 18th, Wednesday

We walked up The Great Wall; it was steep and wonderful. In Chinese, the name -- chang cheng -- means Long Wall. That's true; there are some 6000 km of it, more, some say.

Starting with an hour's train ride on the Y567 to Badaling from Beijing Bei (the North Station, clean and wide, where the trains were white) we rode through what seemed like endless dilapidated suburbs, industrial with rural touches––chickens and sheep searching for food amongst the rubble and neat little vegetable gardens under the poplar trees, people cultivating them with old fashioned tools. We spotted donkey carts and a goat. The greenhouses looked disused, abandoned. One modern touch, however: the houses, small as garden sheds, nearly all had solar panels. In the fields were occasional burial grounds amongst the vegetables, humpy heaps of stones, with little gravestones and sometimes flowers on top of them. A yard full of army tanks and a glimpse of soldiers in camouflage uniforms engaged in what looked like kick boxing. A wasteland full of coal heaps. Huge pylons.

A first view of the Wall, from the train

Suddenly the train turned a corner and we were in the Jundu mountains, precipitous, with orange-brown cliffs, boulders and shrubs all the way up. This is the Great Wall country. The rail tracks followed the narrow Guangou Ravine through the hills, through which the motorway also snaked, army trucks and tourist coaches on it. This was part of the Silk Road and the route Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, used to take to Xanadu, with his elephants. Mauve and white wisteria was in bloom everywhere. On one of the hillside boulders, seemingly inaccessible, a buddha was carved.

After a few tunnels and a stop beyond which we went backwards, the train pulled into Badaling and almost everyone on it piled out and walked up towards the Entrance to the Wall, 800m up the road. The usual hawkers were pestering us, trying to sell us Mao caps and other souvenirs. "Bu yào, bu yào!" (not want!) we said. We passed monuments to various heroes, including Mao, and peculiar shops, one calling itself a "Food drink sapermarket." We bought our tickets and decided to turn south onto the wall; we could have gone up the opposite hill but it seemed slightly more crowded.  Many people were climbing the slope up to the first watchtower on our side in any case, but the further we went, the more they thinned out; the last section was relatively quiet.

Chris, Mr Du and others climbing the steps

Rob, George, Daniel and I with other climbers

The hazy conditions added to the sense of mysterious history. As we gazed around us we were seeing disjointed bits of wall on various hilltops. The watchtowers used to serve as beacons as well; Sha told us that goat's dung was used to produce the best smoke. We spent two hours on the Wall, the men climbing to the furthest publicly accessible watchtower, though Sally and I stopped at the penultimate one. It wasn't unlike mountaineering; the steps were uneven. Handrails were provided but they were generally too low down to be helpful. An international crowd here on this hot day; the Chinese majority clearly much leaner and fitter than the westerners. A few one-child Chinese families were here––as in the city, the babes in arms wearing slit trousers: not a bad idea for avoiding the discomfort of a nappy rash, we thought. There were slits in the walls too, for arrows to be fired through, and fruit trees, maybe apricots, maybe peaches, grew on the steep slopes immediately below the walls, the battlements of which had been repaired and restored as recently as 1987, although some of the stones and the paving stones beneath our feet were genuinely old.

View of the wall continuing beyond our accessible section

George's energetic colleague Daniel was keen to scale the wall on the other side of the entrance gate as well, and did so while the rest of our party searched for some lunch. We found a remarkably quiet restaurant and ordered soups and other enjoyable dishes for sharing between ourselves. Sha's dad probably enjoyed his chance of a quiet smoke and a chat to the staff there after his valiant struggle to communicate with us on the Wall, having helped us up and down its steps in such a gentlemanly manner. We could tell how keen he was to share his knowledge of Chinese history with us; Sha not being present, he must have felt very frustrated by the language barrier. We felt it too. However, in spite of their lack of words, George and his father-in-law seem to enjoy one another's company, which is heart-warming to observe.

George and his father-in-law at Badaling

Beyond the railway station, beside a crumbling fragment of the Wall, we strolled around a walled, fairly deserted village that seemed to be in the process of reconstruction with low houses, cobbled streets, hanging lanterns and a stone arch under a gate tower. Then back on the train to Beijing Bei, where the train was promptly seen to by a team of cleaners brandishing their mops.