the great wall

07 Nov, 2026

不到长城非好汉¹

One Saturday in the autumn of my first year in Beijing I jumped on a bus with some colleagues. Then a subway train. Then another bus. Then we were somewhere in Huairou District, more or less the county town, flagging down one of those old micro vans that used to be used as taxis. A Dutch couple joined us, and off we went.

We arrived at a carpark in a mountain valley on the hillside above a dam, about here. 黄花城/Huánghuāchéng, an unreconstructed section of the Great Wall.

Of course, in our mid-20s pretentiousness, we had to see "authentic" Great Wall, not rebuilt tourist-trap Great Wall.

We walked down the path from the carpark and across the dam. I don't know how I managed that - it's narrow, there were no guardrails, there was water almost up to the brim on the left and a steep and very long drop on the right. But somehow, despite my unease with heights, I managed to cross the dam.

From memory, entry to the wall itself was paid to a couple of old people at an old school desk plonked on the path at the base of the hill on the far side of the dam. The sign said something about forest protection. It was a very, very low price. And then we started clambering up broken down, unreconstructed wall. Loose bricks, gravel, steep slopes. We climbed up to the ruins of a watchtower at a peak on the ridge, then paid, again a very, very low price, to use a ladder to climb to the roof.

There was the reservoir in the valley below on the northern side, and in every direction fold after fold of forested mountain. In my memory, the mountainsides were the dusty, dry brown that dominates from late autumn through to spring, though honestly, I suspect it was still very green.

On the way back down we used a collapsed section of wall to drop down onto the hillside and follow the path along the base of the wall. Somehow I made it back over the dam, and, well, I don't even remember the trip back in to Beijing.

A few years passed and I met a young woman from Yanqing County. She is now my wife. Yanqing, which has since been elevated to District status, lies outside the Great Wall, and so for most of my time in Beijing trips through or under the Great Wall at Juyongguan and Badaling were very common. The main road over to Yanqing also passes Shuiguan in the Jundu Mountains between these two passes.

Juyongguan and Badaling are both reconstructed, "tourist trap" sections of the Great Wall. Not inauthentic. Old things don't have to be ruined to be authentic. Besides, we're all subject to entropy, and every structure needs to be maintained. I suppose we could travel way out into the desert, find some nondescript lump of dirt, and say, "Look at me! I'm at the real, most authentic Great Wall!"

Anyways, I've been through and under the Great Wall many, many times on the way to and from Yanqing. I've visited Badaling a couple of times. One particularly memorable occasion was taking my parents there. It was a Sunday afternoon on an ordinary early December weekend - meaning there were very few people there, a handful of tourists, a few bored souvenir hawkers. Most people were on their way back to Beijing for work and school the next day. Most people were sensible enough to not go climbing up the Great Wall in a howling norwester in early winter. I've never seen my mother look so cold.

The advantage of picking such an absurd day to go clambering over the Great Wall just where the valley is perfectly aligned to catch and focus the coldest and driest of the winds that hit Beijing was that there were very few people around, and that's a great way to get a sense of the scale of a place. People swamp and soak up the landscape and make it seem smaller. Once the crowds are out of the way and the people are limited to a few lonely figures, then you can see how big the mountains are, the scale of this wall snaking over the mountains using the landscape to bolster its defences. That's when you start to understand what you're looking at.

At least where it winds through the mountains in the north of Beijing, the Great Wall is not an especially large structure. It is a long and windy structure, obviously. But the builders cleverly used the landscape, following the ridgelines, to great effect. You don't need to build your wall very high when the enemy needs to clamber up a steep, scrubby slope to get to you.

A few years later, having been back in Aotearoa, we returned to China for a visit. The Child had been quite interested in Genghis Khan, so I made sure to point out how Genghis Khan had brought his army down the basin Yanqing occupies, and up the valley to Badaling. We were standing on the wall at Badaling looking out to the northwest, down into the Yanqing basin. We could see the gleam of the solar power tower, we could make out the buildings of the county town. And we could see the valley that Genghis Khan's army had come charging up, attacking the wall we were standing on.

Apparently he did not succeed, and Genghis Khan had to take his army back down the valley and find another way over the mountains.

The Great Wall is well worth a visit, even if you do "settle" for one of the more touristy sections. Just avoid visiting on any public holiday, and try and get there at a time when all the world's sensible people are safely tucked away in their nice, warm houses.