The Great Wall is huge. It contains many things, even people.

CHINA: The Great Wall

We were fortunate the weather was nice (nice for China: still no blue sky) on the day we visited the Great Wall. Not much sand was blowing off the Gobi Desert, and the temperature was cool. (April, 2006) We wore jackets.

On the hour+ bus ride out of Beijing, our American tour guide, Derrick, told us we would be parking in a newly-constructed parking area just for tour buses. We would climb the area of the wall reserved for foreigners so that we wouldn’t impede the Chinese visitors. Seems that foreigners usually climb a few steps (irregular, some quite high, to foil the invading Mongolian ponies), then stop and pant awhile before continuing.

On the other hand, the physically fit Chinese just clomp, clomp, clomp right along. In the past, this has caused collisions, expletives, and not a few fisticuffs, so the Chinese government decided to keep the two elements separated.

HOW BIG IS IT?

The Great Wall, like everything in China, is huge. When I got back to Honolulu, my favorite waiter at the pancake place “Tsunami’s” asked me if I’d walked the whole wall. Yeah. Right. I guess that’s the perception most of us have. Take a day and walk the wall. Truth is, the thing is over 3,000 miles long. One fellow evidently did traverse the whole thing not too long back—at least the parts that are still there. (Some of it has fallen into total disrepair and some of it has been disassembled so the blocks could serve as construction material for houses.) It took the dude halfway to forever to do it.

So, no, favorite waiter, I didn’t hike the whole length. I did go to the second watch tower though, and had a spectacular view as the wall snaked over mountains and down into valleys. At that point, gasping for breath, heart racing (I do work out at the “Y” on a regular basis, so I’m not all that poorly conditioned) I asked myself, “Why am I doing this?” Not coming up with a valid reason, I returned to the parking area and the shops newly built in anticipation of the Olympics. (I’ll write about shopping in China in a subsequent article.)

Buying a great book of photos with descriptive paragraphs in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and German, I learned a lot. Sometimes the English only had one sentence while the other translations seemed to go on and on, so I often resorted to working my way through the Spanish or French in order to get a more complete story. Of course, I found the ultimate info trove through Google after I got home.

HISTORY AND STRUCTURE

Scott, our local guide, said that the Great Wall was built by the First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, who united all the city states and got their rulers to chip in on their sections of the wall. This would have been a couple of hundred years B.C..

The wall is an amalgam of widths, heights, construction materials, and construction dates. The first parts were actually built to surround cities as defense against the war lords or rulers of other cities and also against those pesky Mongolian raiders, especially the Xiangnu tribe and its cavalry.

After the emperor of the Qin dynasty convinced the other leaders to join their city walls to the super structure, he summarily had them all killed, seeing their leadership ability as a threat to his own throne. (Another example of that harmony stuff I discussed in “China: The Forbidden City”.)

But much more of the wall was built after that, with the Bedaling section where we visited being built in 1505 and some sections built even more recently.

Sections of the wall were built with locally-available materials: tamped earth, stone, tile, brick, marble, and timber. The Qin Dynasty section involved 300,000 soldiers plus conscripted laborers and convicts. In 555 A.D., another section was built using about 2 million laborers. Two million! Wow!

Just what is it? Well, like I said, it varies in height and width, but the Bedaling section where we visited, made mostly of marble blocks, has an average height of 7.8 meters (about 24 feet) with the roadway along the top wide enough for ten soldiers to walk abreast. It snakes across mountains and valleys like a giant dragon, sporting watch towers every few hundred feet.

HOW IT WORKED

These watch towers were actually barracks for soldiers and warehouses for arms and were spaced close enough that soldiers from one barracks could quickly come to the aid of a besieged group at another watchtower.

I don’t know how long their tours of duty lasted, but it must have played hob with family life. I sometimes wonder how China got to be so overpopulated with all the famines, wars, and military tours of duty.

The Great Wall has crenellations as are found in European castle walls. Soldiers could survey the countryside through them, then shoot at invaders through the embrasures below.

A communications system grew up with signal towers spreading across the countryside. Fuel was stored—animal dung being a favorite because it smokes like crazy—to be lit when an enemy was approaching. Seeing the smoke and fire, the watchman at the next signal tower then lit his dung heap and so on, passing the word to the city and villages in the enemy’s path. This was quick and effective in the days before radio, telephones, and internet. Ingenious.

Reflecting the multi-culturalism of early China, the section of wall at Juyong Pass (30 miles from downtown Beijing) has a marble platform with bas-relief sculptures of the four Heavenly Kings, with Buddhist incantations in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongolian, Uygur, Han, and Xixia. Niches in the wall contain 2,000 Buddhist sculptures. Genghis Khan fought a major battle in this area, and I’d like to see it. Next trip, maybe.

Much of the roadway on top of the wall is now overgrown with bushes and even trees making passage difficult. The Bedaling section is nicely restored and free of vegetation, however, awaiting visitors. A couple of men in our group hiked to the end of the restoration and said it ended abruptly in a drop-off. I’ll take their word for it.

Scott, ever the champion of the people (See China: Tiananmen Square) told us the wall was built using clay and rice as a binder. If you’ve ever clogged your kitchen sink drain by washing out your rice pot, you know how gummy rice can be. Scott said the wall was built at great cost to human life at a time when rice was scarce and many peasants were starving.

We asked about the rumor we’d heard that bodies of workmen were entombed in the wall. He said, “Of course. The workmen were overworked and underfed and thousands died. What were they going to do with the bodies? It’s logical they would become part of the structure.” It gave us an eerie feeling as we gazed at the magnificent wall. I was glad we were there in the daytime.

In the days before modern weapons, the wall did a good job of defending China. I’d heard that the enemy just did an end run around it, but that’s not entirely true . According to the website of Travel China Guide, China fell to the Mongols due to weak government and poverty of the peasants.

Then again, in 1644 AD, the Manchus crossed the wall by convincing (threats? bribes?) a Chinese guard to open the gates of Shanhai Pass. Legend has it that it took three whole days for the Manchu army to enter. And that was the end of the Ming Dynasty.
Next: China: Praying for Rain