China Day 2: The Great Wall « Steve and Pam Wise

by Steve and Pam Wise

The Holiday Inn Express may be a modest hotel ($70 a night in a pricey city), but the beds are terrific and we had a great night’s sleep. Breakfast was a minimal affair; some watermelon chunks and a couple of hardboiled eggs. But the driver was right on time and we were away in a very nice vehicle driven by an excellent driver who knew the backroads and could avoid a lot of the traffic headache. He also knew the outside dimensions of his vehicle as if it were a second skin and we made the trip to Mutianyu in under two hours. We figured were going to do plenty of walking that day so we took the gondola ride to the top of the wall to begin our hike.

The wall is built along the top of a ridge; several hundred ridges in fact, as the wall winds its way across 7,000 kilometers of China’s northern and western borders. Originally built around 200 B.C. of stamped mud, it was expanded during the Han Dynasty and again under the Qin in the 12th century A.D. However it was unequal to the task of keeping Genghis Khan and his Mongol troops from conquering China begining in 1206 and continuing until the death of his grandson Kublai Khan in 1294. After the restoration of imperial China in the Ming Dynasty, 1367 to 1644, the wall underwent an extensive repair and rebuild, this time with more substantial building materials of rock, brick and mortar. It is this wall, some sections of which are nearly 650 years old, that has survived to the present age. Although nowhere near as artistic or inspiring as St Paul’s in Rome, which was finished at around the same time, it is impressive not only for its massive size but also for the beauty of its natural surroundings.

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