In May 2008, my businessman brother had an extra seat on a trip to China. He invited me to join him and on an incredibly clear day, we visited the Great Wall of China.
We’d flown up that morning from Shanghai, and he had an expatriate friend celebrating his children’s birthday at a rustic restaurant far out in the countryside. We paid our respects (I brought a copy of Go, Dog, Go for the two year old twins) and then headed northeast.
It was a beautiful May day, the fruit trees were blooming and the sky was a gorgeous blue. The driver took us through small villages and along a river. Hills loomed to the east.
When the road entered an open valley, I noticed something crawling along the top of the ridge: gray and patterned, my mind immediately went to a dragon (actually, the dragon in Frank Peretti‘s The Oath), and I marveled at the undulation over the hill top.
Wait.
That was the Great Wall of China!
I glued my face to the window watching. Towers came and went, the hilltop dipped down and went up and the stone wall followed all the contours in an unbroken line. Click to Tweet
It was mesmerizing.
I tried to be casual about it, “oh, yeah, there’s the great wall,” but it drew my eyes and captured my imagination and I could hardly sit still.
My brother, of course, laughed.
I’d read several books about the Great Wall of China, long before I ever dreamed of seeing it. One, in particular, was the story of a woman who rode a horse along the entire length of the wall. The photos were marvels as she started at the ocean, where the wall began waist high, traveling the length of the wall across the country (nearly six thousand miles) until it petered out into stones in the Gobi Desert.
Fewer tourists at Mutianyu
We ended up at the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China, about fifty miles northeast of Beijing. Our driver parked in a lot near the base of the hill and got out his magazine. We walked through a tourist village, past trinkets and hawkers, to a stone walkway. The towers beckoned, and it was nearly straight up.
(You can take a cable car up, but we hiked in our tennis shoes.) Click to Tweet
It was a nice stretch through a green hillside filled with trees. It took maybe ten minutes until we came to a door at the bottom of a tower. We climbed up and walked out onto the wall.
As in, the Great Wall of China.
There was no one there.
All I’d heard about China was how crowded it was. A description from Paul Theroux‘s book Riding the Iron Rooster, had stayed with me for years: “In China, when you look out the window, someone is always looking back.” Click to Tweet
They weren’t at Mutianyu with us the day before Mother’s Day.
(Look at the photo on top. There are perhaps six people besides us).
On that day, six weeks before the start of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the sky stretched blue and clear. The views were glorious.
My brother was dumbfounded. “I’ve visited China maybe twenty times. I’ve never seen blue sky like this.”
We walked along the stone pavement to the farthest tower. The Great Wall of China at Mutianyu is a massive structure: 26 feet high; 15 feet wide. It stretches a couple miles before falling apart into overgrown trees.
From the tower, I looked out a window–a casement opening, basically–to the north. “There’s Mongolia,” I whispered, and felt the thrill of foreign names.
Mutianyu Slide; photo from Pinterest
The wall was originally built, of course, to keep out the Mongol hordes, but they breached it without too much effort in the thirteen century.
It never really was much of a strategic deterence, but as a beautiful, awe-inspiring spot, it serve its nation very well.
We enjoyed ourselves going down. Instead of hiking, we rode their “slide.”
Have you ever wanted to visit the Great Wall of China?
What would you do to keep out the invading hordes at your house?
Thoughts? Reactions? Lurker?