No discussion of great world engineering works would be complete without the Great Wall of China. However, since we had visited the Great Wall on a previous trip in 2005 we did not repeat that in 2017. For the sake of the topic at hand, I include some photos and a journal entry from our 2005 trip giving our earlier description of the Great Wall.

6/27/2005.   Cloudy and humid.   Low: 70F. High: 86F.

After lunch, we continued our drive to the Great Wall via very long and rough back roads from Beijing to Mutanyu, passing through many small backcountry villages in the mountains along the way. Once again, there were dozens of interesting scenes to photograph, but we were just moving along too fast for photos from the moving van, with my view of the world zipping by the side window .. each scene was gone as soon as I saw it. This road was very rough, and we got bounced around in the back of the van so much that after a while it felt like we were riding a bucking bronco.

Some observations on the backcountry: villages along the way had very rough and crude buildings for homes. There were lots of brick walls dividing off alleyways and courtyard homes.  Of the people you would see around some would be working, some sitting around in front of shops, talking, playing mah jong, watching TV, leaning against buildings.

Photo Ch-06-21, small village on the way to the Mutanyu Wall

In one place, we saw a hand-dug trench for a new water line out in the middle nowhere: no cones or barricades; no shoring; no workers around. In another place I noticed gabion-like stone structures across a dry creek bed, presumably for erosion control during floods. There were all manner of people and vehicles on the road constantly barely missing collisions with each other.

Mutianyu, the village below the Great Wall was a big tourist trap full of hawkers selling trinkets and postcards … very aggressive but no worse than what we experienced in Morocco when we lived there for 2 years while in the Navy. We brushed the hawkers off with our technique learned in Morocco, although I kind of felt badly doing this .. it’s a tough way to make a living and you know that these folks are poor.

Photo Ch-06-24, row of hawker stalls at Mutianyu below the Great Wall

Went for a pit stop here .. the facilities were extremely dirty and primitive. The splashing noise that I heard was the urinal’s pipe which emptied out onto the floor splashing around my feet! You’ve got to be kidding!! There was also some kind of community shower in the next room that was filthy. You would have to be really desperate!

There was a ski-lift type tram up the mountain from this village which got you the last thousand vertical feet or so to the Great Wall on top of the ridge.

Photo Ch-07-09A, riding the chair lift tram up to the Great Wall on the ridgetop

They say Bill Clinton visited the Wall here. The conditions for photography were not that great (cloudy day with considerable haze) but even so, the views were tremendous with very rugged mountains all around. Thousands of miles long, the wall is mind-boggling in its scope. It had been restored here, but not on adjacent hills where it was easy to see sections of wall falling apart with trees growing out of it.

Photo Ch-07-14, a restored section of the wall going up a nearby ridge

 

Photo Ch-08-05, showing Ming Dynasty stone construction on the Great Wall at Mutianyu

A note on the history of the Great Wall — one should bear in mind that when we speak of the Great Wall, there is not a single wall on a single alignment across the north of China. There are dozens of segments of wall scattered all over northern China, including some much shorter sections in isolated areas south of Beijing not connected to any of the longer sections of wall to the north. See the map below.

 

Map of the History of the Great Wall.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Great_Wall_of_China#/media/File:Map_of_the_Great_Wall_of_China.jpg; Jan, Michel / Michaud, Roland / Michaud, Sabrina: Die Chinesische Mauer, München 2000 (Hirmer),

Some portions of the Great Wall were built around 500 BC or earlier by independent warring states, which were then connected by the first emperor of China Qin Shi Huang starting in about 220 BC to provide protection from northern nomads. These were quite primitive barriers made from rammed earth reinforced with layers of straw, and ran across the north of China from Gansu Province in the west to the coast of Manchuria … vast distances, indicating how early and persistent the idea of walls as barriers to invasions originated. Very little survives of these early walls except in some arid areas of the west.

Down through the centuries, other segments of wall were built by other dynasties such as the Han, Wei, and Jin Dynasties built or rebuilt sections of wall, sometimes following the older Qin Dynasty sections, but often not. Other dynasties, such as the Tang, Song, Yuan, and Qing Dynasties were generally not wall-builders. This is not surprising as some dynasties originated north of the wall and their controlled territory extended far beyond the wall.

Most of the Great Wall that we know today was built under the Ming Dynasty in the 1500s. Some sections near Beijing such as at Badaling and Mutianyu have been extensively reconstructed for tourism purposes, while much of the wall remains deteriorated. The sections such as what we saw at Mutianyu show the more sophisticated construction techniques used by the Ming builders with large bricks mortared in place.

Quite often you read about the wall being something like 3,000 miles long, but such a description would have to be including lengths of widely scattered sections of wall.  As the crow flies, it is around 1,700 miles from the farthest west extents to the farthest east extents in what is now North Korea. But any way you look at it, the thousands of miles of wall built over thousands of years by millions of workers represent one of the most impressive construction undertakings anywhere in the world. When you think of the effort and difficulty of building even 10 miles of wall in such steep and remote terrain, the thought of building thousands of miles of such walls boggles the imagination.

When we were done with our sightseeing up on the wall, for the return trip back down to the village below, we went down via a summer luge which was a gas! You could really get going fast, and I caught up with Amanda and tailgated her trying to get her to go faster after I got the hang of it.

Photo Ch-08-07A, descending from the Mutianyu Wall via the luge

We came back to Beijing a different way. There was lots of tourist infrastructure on the road down out of the mountains: restaurants, pools, hotels, but hardly any tourists at all. There were several places where you could see a restaurant with a big patio outside that could seat a couple of hundred people, but there would only be like 10 people there. The swimming pools had no water in them by and large, as if this is not the tourist season.

After about 45 minutes, BAM! we were back in a high rise “satellite city” packed with huge buildings and tons of people, but still far from Beijing. There was all manner of sights of people on foot, bikes, motorcycles, trucks, vans, cars, fences of lattice bamboo.

There was a fair amount of road work in progress on the avenues on the way back, even past 5 or 6 p.m., past what we would consider to be normal working hours. The closer we got back to Beijing, the worse the smog got. The sun became a red dot in the sky.

Along the way there were lots of city buses jammed with people who looked hot and tired. Along here we were traveling with the air conditioning in our touring van turned off and it got so warm and humid inside the van that our daughter Amanda finally piped up and asked the driver to turn the A/C on. I wondered if the air conditioning for us is too cool for them.

There was a fantastic volume of construction coming into Beijing plus huge new high rise buildings … new freeways under construction for the 2008 Olympics.

For dinner, we had a buffet dinner at our hotel at 8 pm, which was still open and had a fair number of people eating .

After dinner, I went for a walk down the Wangfujing Dajie which was just a block to the west. The Wangfujing is like the Champs Elysees of Beijing, a glitzy shopping street with lots of stores, shops, sidewalk cafes and so forth. The sidewalks were teeming with people out for an evening stroll. I even got propositioned by three hookers along the way! And there was a big contraption that looked like a “reverse bungee jump” that attracted a lot of attention from onlookers. This thing was like a “reverse sling shot”: a big steel frame several stories high with elastic cables coming down to a seating device (with 3 seats) that was attached to the ground. A person got into one of the seats, then the elastic cables would be pulled tighter and tighter from above, then the whole assembly was let go like a slingshot and the fellow in the seat was vaulted up into the night air a good 5 stories in a second or two. That had to be a definite rush!   It was 86º at 8 p.m.

Back in the hotel room, we were all wiped out after a long day. I fell asleep for about an hour laying on the bed, then got up at 10:30 to work on this journal. Off to bed at midnight.

It was a great day, but we suffered from sensory overload! You just can’t soak it all in. I shot 4½ rolls of film today and could have done twice as much if the van had stopped at every photo op.