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It took most of the afternoon to bicycle out of Beijing. After a morning of gathering everything we could think of, and swinging by Starbucks for a last cup of coffee for who knows how long, we finally started riding around one in the afternoon. At four, we were riding by the summer palace at the northeastern corner of the city. <br />

Great Wall

John Locke
2006-03-29 10:28:04

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hadn't climbed a hill yet in China, but now the rules of bicycle touring took hold--90% of the time climbing, 10% descending. All of the traffic, however, was on the big new expressway that led straight to the Great Wall at Badaling. The old road we traveled had the odd wagon, tractor, or pickup truck with a load of coal. We passed people pushing their bikes up the hill, and each time they sputtered in surprise as we went by.

After passing a toll gate on the freeway, we no longer saw any bikes. We kept climbing and climbing--a fairly gentle grade, mostly--but nonstop.

And then we saw it. A lot sooner than we thought, the light brown wall lined the top of a ridge, snaked down a spur to the road. We passed a couple resorts, climbed a couple of windy stretches, and then we were there. Not that we knew where "there" was. Juyongguan pass. Not the "Great Wall," but close enough for now.

The Great Wall is a myth, really. You hear all sorts of misinformation about it--that it's the only human building visible from the moon, that it's one single, continuous wall, that it was all built around the same time to keep the Mongols out of China. The hordes of Chinese and foreign tourists buy into the myth whole-heartedly. But the actual history of the wall is more interesting than the myth.

For starters, it's not continuous, and it never has been. Segments were built here and there in particularly vulnerable valleys, and across startlingly imposing ridges. But the Mongols went around the segments easily, pillaging the Ming countryside at their leisure. The wall at Juyongguan parallels the Great wall, about 12 km closer to Beijing, and was built a few decades later. It's steeper, narrower, and in some ways more photogenic than the wall at Badaling.

Until recently, the Great Wall was a European myth--early travelers saw segments of the walls in different areas and assumed it was continuous, creating the myth. In the Cultural Revolution, in fact, the Chinese government took great pains to destroy large areas of the already ruined wall. But now, suddenly it's the national symbol, and much has been reconstructed. One of the surprising things about the wall is its newness.

We climbed the eastern section at Juyongguan until it started downhill again, getting quite worn out in the process...

It took another couple hours to ride up to Badaling, the most visited site on the Great Wall. Compared to Juyongguan, the Badaling wall was wide enough for a formation of soldiers to march along. Our guide book said that sometimes skateboarding was permitted, though only for the truly insane. Must be a population control method...

More to come...