Great Wall. April 1998
I visited the Great Wall of China three times: the first, because I was in Beijing and it was high on my list, and then on subsequent visits accompanying others who had not been.
In 1986 I was in China on my first solo trip. I felt quite proud of travelling there at that time because the PRC had most recently opened up to individual tourists and was largely unknown to the outside world. The Great Wall was something one HAD TO SEE. I wanted to say, "I have stood on the Great Wall". Such a huge tick mark on my infinite list of "must visit" places, I was extremely determined to view it with my own eyes.
Along with my lost memories of Sydney, Australia [see: Sydney], I also cannot recall who was with me at the Great Wall on my first trip. I most certainly did not go alone. I think perhaps I joined an organized tour from Beijing because getting there alone at that time would have been nearly impossible without speaking Chinese. I vaguely recall a small tour in a van that took us to the nearby Ming Tombs and then onto the Wall itself. I have taken so many small tours like that in my life unless one of the members was an axe-murderer, I never remember anyone from those pre-packaged pieces of travel.
I was lucky. China was still recovering from the aftereffects of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese at the time were poor, hardworking people who all wore Mao-suits. There were literally no Chinese tourists anywhere on that first visit. It is hard for me to imagine now, looking at Chinese tourists who seemingly have spread all over the globe, that when I first went to their country, they didn't even visit famous places in their own backyard. The consequence for me at the Great Wall? It was empty! There were a few random, foreign tour groups, but basically I just walked and walked along the wall alone. THAT was an amazing experience. In the mountains outside of Beijing, I was standing on the Great Wall watching it slither and snake away from me in both directions. The Great Wall was impressive in that way, yet in another - not really.
Ah the specter of expectations always looms in my travels. What could possibly match the build up to seeing the Great Wall of China? I remember the reaction of those on my tour being the same as mine - "this is it??" One expects a MASSIVE barrier when in fact it is more like a low, unending castle wall that stretches infinitely in both directions. It is not the size of the wall that impresses - it is its length and its location in the mountains (at least that stretch of it).
As we listened and learned from our guide about the Wall, two surprising facts were made clear - one, it was not built all at once as a defense against outside invaders but in stages over a long period of time. Its purpose was actually as a "road" for forces to move rapidly along the mountainous border to wherever an incursion was taking place. The Great Wall was really the "Great Road" of China. More ominously, the second thing we discovered was that the Great Wall was made with forced labor. It was hard, backbreaking work and many of the laborers died. They were literally interred inside the wall. If people like to point to the Colosseum in Rome as a symbol of human cruelty, it pales in comparison to the Great Wall which is literally a human graveyard for over 20,000 km. In sections that have fallen apart, the mud-pounded interior of the wall is littered with human remains. I guess China doesn't want to publicize the dark history of its most famous landmark although it is locally well-known.
On that first visit, we went to a restored section of Wall where one could walk to the end and then see what the "real" unrenovated wall looked like. The parts of the Wall that were not restored were obvious but in total ruin. The Chinese government has since slowly restored longer and longer sections of the Wall, but it will never be all remade. There would be no point and it would be very expensive to renovate and maintain something that, in many places, visitors could not even access. On my first visit we were lucky to walk a bit of the unrenovated Wall - that is no longer allowed.
In sum, I was both impressed and unimpressed. I was impressed that any structure could be built literally to go up and down over very steep mountains. That was "wow", off the chart. I was as equally unimpressed that the Great Wall of China was really not all that massive and not living up to the false idea that 'it could be seen from space". With a telescope it might be visible, but otherwise the Great Wall was actually pretty small.
I returned to the Great Wall a year later with my roommate from Japan, David. By that time, it had become more popular. Although still relatively empty, there were far more people than the first visit. After that, David returned to Japan and I started my first great round-the-world journey. The train from Beijing into Mongolia passed right under the Great Wall of China. I remember my fellow passengers were abuzz as we passed, but I had seen it twice by that time and was nonplussed. Nonetheless, I did take a train under the Great Wall - that was kind of amazing.
Finally, on Brian's first trip to Beijing and my third, we visited the wall again - this time in a private taxi tour. We still visited the Ming Tombs and followed the same itinerary as my previous visits. I thought it was funny that nothing had changed in the intervening years - same tour itinerary. However, the number of visitors at the Wall had! It was packed with people and it was far more difficult, but still possible, to walk until one was "alone" on the wall. The unrenovated sections were no longer accessible. The Chinese had finally become tourists in their own land. I appreciated my earlier, emptier visits more. Brian appeared happy simply to be standing on the Great Wall watching it snake across the mountains - a feeling I fully understood having experienced it years earlier.
I visited the Great Wall three times and I never intended to - it just happened. What those visits inspired me to do was to see both ends of the wall - the one at the sea and the other deep in the interior of China. My travel "to do" list, like the Great Wall, seemed to stretch to infinity...
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