AT Badaling, the Great Wall rides the ridgelines like a dragon, its gray brick scales glinting and its crenellated spine writhing. Built at a strategic pass in the mountains north of Beijing, it crosses stout gates, plunges into narrow defiles, climbs back up to the heights and seems to go on forever.
Long after the Olympic Games end in Beijing, people will flock to Badaling, where seeing is believing in the Ten Thousand Li Long Wall of ancient annals and legend.
But contrary to the impression it makes at Badaling, the Great Wall may never have crossed China in one mighty, continuous span, nor is its length precisely known. (Some say it is 4,500 miles, others a mere 3,100.) Experts now think of it as a series of disjointed segments built at different times in the last two millenniums and scattered in a maze all over northern China.
William Lindesay, a preservationist who walked 1,500 miles of far-flung wall in 1987 — from Jiayuguan in the desert of Gansu province to Shanhaiguan in eastern Hebei province, where the Great Wall meets the Yellow Sea — called it a giant jigsaw puzzle.
“You have to imagine and believe,” he told me last year in Beijing. “There is no place to see it all.”
Nor is there just one wall to see. Its character varies widely from one vantage point to the next, as I discovered last year. During a stay in Beijing to study Mandarin, I made forays to various stretches of the wall.
Badaling is a starting place, the centerpiece of an estimated 380 miles of Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) fortifications in the capital region, the highest concentration of Great Wall in China.
The site is easily accessible from Beijing. It opened as a tourist attraction in 1957, with plentiful visitor facilities and well-maintained, relatively gradual steps to the top where visitors see long stretches of reconstructed brick-and-stone wall, together with a knot of spurs and cunningly engineered Ming watchtowers.
The Badaling section would be the picture-perfect Great Wall. But about 4.5 million people visit each year, resulting in crowds and commercial exploitation that make it difficult for the casual visitor to enjoy the wall.
The gridlocked road up to the ticket booths leads past a dilapidated zoo. Inside the complex are moldering museums, cable cars, espresso stands, ersatz antiques shops and a Great Wall Circle-Vision theater. Bus exhaust billows, hot dogs steam, tour groups assemble and souvenir hawkers swarm.
First visit
So, on my first visit to China 10 years ago, I went to Mutianyu, east of Badaling, favored for its architecture and forested landscape. The Mutianyu wall was begun in the 6th century and reconstructed 1,000 years later. After that, the wall was neglected; Communist Party leaders even once encouraged vandalism, viewing the wall as a vestige of the nation’s long, dark feudal past.
Concerted reconstruction began after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978 and began to reverse Mao Zedong-era policies. “Let us love our China and restore our Great Wall,” Deng wrote in 1984, launching restoration projects along the length of it, including work at Mutianyu.
Here, the Great Wall stretches for almost 1.4 miles, interspersed by 22 watchtowers, including three connected bastions at the lowest part of the pass. Its parapets are lined with merlons and embrasures from which the emperor’s men rained arrows and gunpowder bombs on mounted warriors from the north.
As I discovered on my return trip to China last year, visitors now encounter Badaling-force crowds and relentless souvenir peddlers at Mutianyu. It is a stiff, 45-minute climb to the Wall, so many visitors avoid aching leg muscles by taking the cable car up and the toboggan ride down.
A decade of development, encouraged by the economic opening of China, has brought great changes to the Great Wall region north of Beijing. After decades of being pent up in the city, newly flush Beijingers now drive their own cars, loaded with bikes, skis and camping gear, into the mountains or go on family outings to see peach blossoms in the spring and pick apples in the fall.
Some have bought fancy new condos near the wall or country places in old stone garrison towns deserted by farmers drawn to the city for work. Hotels and resorts have sprung up, such as the deluxe Commune by the Great Wall Kempinski near Badaling, where contemporary architecture competes for attention with the ancient monument.
Meanwhile, the wall is being put to surprising new uses. In 2004, the Chinese government staged a rock concert headlined by Cyndi Lauper on a revolving stage built atop a watchtower. Every spring, thousands of runners gather in a village 80 miles north of Beijing to compete in the grueling Great Wall Marathon. And in 2007, the wall served as a catwalk for fashion models in Karl Lagerfeld couture.
Developments such as these have helped make the wall more accessible than ever, but they’ve also prompted objections from conservationists and devoted Great Wall pilgrims. The renewed interest has also encouraged people like me to seek out untrammeled places to visit the wall and new ways of seeing it.
At the Red Capital Ranch by the Wall, east of Mutianyu in the Shen Tang Yu valley, I spent two glorious, moonlit nights underneath the wall in the border territory where Qing Dynasty Emperor Kangxi loved to hunt and ride.
Since his time (1654-1722), fishing resorts and vacation homes have come to the narrow little valley. But get past the point where the two-lane highway passes through a gap in the Great Wall and it is easy to imagine oneself being carried on a palanquin to a hunting lodge at the edge of the Manchurian plain.
The ranch is romantic but rustic, strung out along an idling river where ducks cruise, fish jump and plastic bags float. Its high-ceilinged stone villas and pavilions, decorated with an eclectic mix of Asian antiques, evoke the world of Kangxi, and the waterfront restaurant serves dishes that might have pleased him, including venison satay and fried pumpkin.
