The Friday Photo: Great Wall of China

Even after the Terracotta Warriors and Tiger Leaping Gorge, the Great Wall of China really does take your breath away. First built more than two millennia ago, it winds away over the top of the mountains, whipped by desert winds, as far as the eye can see.

The Great Wall of China seen through the gate of a guardpost.

And it’s easy to imagine, standing in the frigid guardhouses in air so cold the water in your bottle freezes, the terror and tedium of the guards that walked those walls, waiting for nomad raiders or poor revolutionaries to break their way across its vast expanse.


3 Responses

  1. Lovely photos. We have not yet had the opportunity to visit the great wall. I really want to go though 🙂

  2. Bob Shaw says:

    I was there back in 1985. If you want to see the REAL wall you have to walk quite a ways to get to where it isn’t being rebuilt for the tourists. I walked to the left. I’m not sure how far you have to go to the right to find the REAL wall.

    Foreigners think of it as some sort of national monument but the Chinese I traveled with said it was a symbol of repression and slavery.

    Thousands if not hundreds of thousands died building it. Their bodies were thrown into the wall and they kept on building.

    If you go, be sure and eat in the American restaurant not the Chinese. The Chinese Restaurant is full of Americans and the American is full of Chinese.

    I had a great time dining with Chinese families. Lots of smiling and laughing and sharing of food. The Chinese are wonderful people.

    • Theodora says:

      100% with you on how wonderful the Chinese are, Bob. And, yes, since Shi Huangdi started on it in 200BC it’s cost many hundreds of thousands of lives.

      They’re rebuilding or have rebuilt vast stretches of it now — I imagine you wouldn’t recognise it. This bit is on the Badaling stretch but quite a long way from the main tourist part — it’s by where the peasant revolt broke through in the 1650s. To the right of the break, the wall has been rebuilt for a mile or so, I’d guess. To the left, it’s still pretty ruinous. So you can choose, as you did, which way to go.

      I’d have loved to seen China in the 80s. Must have been fascinating. And incredibly different from how it is today.