The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China had been pieced together from the fortifications warlords had built to protect their small kingdoms since at least the 7th c. BC. They had communicated between the mountain peaks by smoke signals of burning wolf dung,  so close to present-day Beijing. When the Qin dynasty united China in 221 BC, the disparate walls were joined together by forced labor and civilian labor, and many many died in the process. When in 1644 the Mongolians easily broke through the crumbling remains of the Ming dynasty's fortifications and founded the Qing dynasty, the Wall was left to ruin. No, it cannot be viewed from outer space, but it is still a gorgeous sight that we had first seen on our aerial descent into Beijing.

From our first days in Beijing we had been plied with the business cards of a "China International Travel Service" and had an easy time reserving a car and guide for the Great Wall for about $40. A van with guide and driver showed up before 8 at our doorstep: Roberta, a smooth and subtle English-speaker, and the driver who seemed to understand English but wouldn't speak it. We drove out of Beijing to a countryside that resembles Morocco, poplars and catalpas glittering along dry waterbeds, richer-looking farming and orchards, vendors along the road.

As we neared the city of Matian Yu, located near the Great Wall, commercial density accumulated at the sides of the road. Country folk convert their homes to inns and restaurants, where tour buses gathered in dense traffic. But Roberta was upbeat--the crowds were so much better, she said, than a few days earlier. Visitors had been flocking to the Wall to avoid the worse crowds at Tian'men and the Forbidden City, but visitors were finally thinning out.

Ascending to the Great Wall

Amidst endless tour buses that somehow avoided colliding in parking lot after parking lot, a ski lift lofts you over vegetable gardens and forests among the folds of small mountains to a platform alongside the gray bricks of the wall. Gray is the color for the common people, yellow and red are Imperial colors, and blue and green are for princes and for temples. The irregular steps that follow the mountainous contours of the Wall can be high boulders or shallow gradations of brick or stone, and they are mobbed with Chinese and foreigners. Mao proclaimed that anyone who visits the Wall is a hero, and all of China wants to become a hero. Giant letters visible from an airplane or the surrounding area proclaim "This Wall Belongs to Mao."

Up on the hilly stones is the rest of the world, too. Nowhere else had we seen so many French, British, Italian - a lama in Tibetan crimson, old and bent Chinese. Tiny children protested the climb and posed, the elderly inched along, and then stood upright to pose against the snaky wall behind them. The criminals who were forced to build the wall had died in their labors, while civilians and military had been taken better care of. The towers, of the early 15th (1404 for example) have rough arches in a kind of convoluted crypt fashion, that provided a bedroom in the center with auxiliary rooms and lookouts on top. 

We pressed on, up and down, steeply, past exhaustion to find we had gone several towers too far from where Roberta had instructed us to turn back. We collapsed at a lift station, a plaza that memorialized the glory of China. And then, to get down the mountains, we slid down "tobaggons", rubber seats with throttles for brakes, on a smooth metal slide.

For lunch we ate tiny salted almonds at the parking lot, whose price Jacques bargained down to a third. (Standard, he says. He's been bargaining almost since he was born in Senegal, and says you can expect the opening price to be three times the real price.)

Picnic in a tower

But there is always a price to pay for an interesting guided tour with a Chinese person who can really help you understand the world around you--the "museums"! They are "factories"--apparently the factory aspect is just a put-on, for they are really outlets for the Chinese government to force fixed prices on tourists. We would learn that Chinese tourists are avid buyers at these "museums." We had visited a cloisonne factory on the way, a rustic chatty affair no doubt set up for show, and purchased a vase in the shop. It was an education in the craftsmanship - cloisonné is enameled copper. Then after our hike on the Wall, we were taken, whether we would or no, to more buying opportunities.

Descending from the Great Wall

Jacques wanted instead to visit the Ming tombs but Roberta said no, the traffic would be prohibitive. Later she told us she had received the news that three tourists had just been run over by a provincial tour bus there, traffic was backed up and Embassy staff was rushing to the scene of the accident.

We drove endlessly through reedy, verdant countryside, past duck ponds where young and old sat with their fishing poles, past fruit stands and bio-tourism. We entered the area of the Olympic village, with wooden Tibetan houses atop shops - Chinatown they called it, with its silk factory where a Taoist god of wealth stood at the entrance.

"This Wall Belongs to Mao"

A frantic 20-something with a difficult accent rushed us through the silk-making process as "workers" stood at their posts on the linoleum rooms of what was actually a kind of silk department store. I was invited to participate, stretching tufts of silk to fill comforters, which was what they wanted us to buy. (And the opportunity would come again and again.) But we bought a silk vest that struck me as particularly beautiful.

"Making a silk comforter"

Then Roberta rushed us to an ATM - for the final stop, the scam we had read about. (It had grown too late for the "tea museum.") In the uninspiring neon-lit bowels of an Olympic building we sat on couches and were brought scalding basins of tea to soak our feet, while being lectured on a kind of Tibetan tea-bag medicine by an unflinching pretty young girl, who brought in the "doctor." He was a study in inscrutability, with a face that masked all, pale smooth skin with slits for eyes. After a quick glance at our hands he told Jacques that he had prostate problems and I had circulation problems. With young men pummelling our feet, a growing number of "specialists" practiced a hard sell of their 200 yuan miraculous teabags, but Jacques kept smiling and shaking his head no. As we left, Roberta and the driver seemed almost apologetic, or was that my imagination?

The Olympics remembered

Then we walked around the Olympic area, among kites and hawkers and lame singers with beautiful voices and loud sound systems, amid the Olympic memories of glowing neon buildings, purple and blue and green, the most important of which (The Bird's Nest) stands empty and unused. Under the misting sky we breathed fresh air, before descending to Beijing.