Today is the Great Wall, one of the things I’ve wanted to see all my life. One of my own personal Wonders of the World. And the reason - along with the Terracotta Warriors - that I’ve come to China. That and pandas.
While eating breakfast this morning, an article in the China Daily newspaper announced a national ban on eating and drinking in the subway. To be applied April 1st (no fooling!). It also bans playing music or videos in public. Thirty-five Chinese cities have subways, for a total of 5,295 kilometers (with 370 more km to be built), including 678 km in Beijing, to handle 13.7 million trips a day. They’re also installing facial recognition equipment, “to improve transport efficiency”. (Right!)
Beijing lies in a plain draining several rivers that run northeast to southwest out of the mountains to its north and west. Some mountains are basalt, most are granite, limestone and gneiss, all very old so highly eroded. Summers in Beijing are hot and steamy (thus the Summer Palace I saw yesterday), winters Siberian. As the road climbs, we leave the pollution visible today behind us, but still accompanied by the red banners with white lettering that extol the Chinese to be better people or praise the government. We cross arid countryside, with terracing to help prevent erosion.
Stanley gives us a bit of history en route. Beijing is 3,000 years old and has had various names, the present of which means north (bei) capital (jing). Peking is how the European missionaries heard it. Both the Mongols and then the Manchurians conquered Beijing - and China - but the Manchurians adopted Chinese culture instead of imposing their own. Stanley also mentions the Silk Road, which flourished for over 2,000 years. That trade route, including for highly lucrative silk goods, connected China - and the rest of East Asia and Southeast Asia - with South Asia, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa and Southern Europe. The Great Wall played an important part in the protection of that route.
The Great Wall itself is 21,000 miles long, running east to west, rising out of the ocean and disappearing into the Gobi Desert. It would cross the entire United States. Built in 221 B.C. by China’s first centralized government, it took only ten years to complete, according to Stanley. Its purpose was to protect from the Huns occupying Mongolia. (The part we will visit was reconstructed in the Ming Dynasty.) The labor force was made up of slaves and criminals, soldiers, and peasants working as payment of their taxes (feudal system). First they laid a solid stone base. Then they mixed sand, clay and straw - held together by sticky rice water - to build layers of earthen wall. That was then covered with stone and brick on the outside and paved on top with stone and brick.
Towers spaced along the top provided housing for soldiers and storage for the goods supplied by roads leading up to the wall. Soldiers’ families were given land so they could be nearby. There were nine subsections in all, with a general for each three sections.
The Great Wall also served as a road and a signal system. There were large beacon towers to warn of attacks: fires by night, smoke by day... The same system France’s Rhone Valley used to warn of Viking incursions sailing up from the Mediterranean.
South of the wall laid farmland, albeit arid; north was just grassland.
But the whole system failed when one sentinel, unhappy - like all Chinese then - with the emperor, and more particularly with his concubine having been taken for the Emperor’s use, simply opened one gate and let the enemy in.
Knowing all this, we begin our ascent. From the start I acquire a mascot, a tiny lady whose age is hard to guess. 45? 55? She accompanies me throughout, her bag of books, fans and T-shirts over her shoulder. I end up buying two wonderful books of photos for 300 yuan... about $40. What it probably would have cost in a bookshop... but the bookshop wouldn’t have climbed all those stairs. I’m sure that money is a lot for her.
A surprise at the top: one of the towers has been set up for our lunch. Didn’t think the announced “lunch at the Wall” would mean this! Someone has schlepped all the way up those steps carrying food, drinks (including champagne), chafing dishes, tables, chairs, white tablecloths and napkins, chinaware, glassware, cutlery, vases of white roses... and then sprinkled red and white rose petals all over the floor. Talk about special!
We’re given time to explore and I decide to climb up to one of the watchtowers on a crest. It also has a storehouse looming over a precipice. (A family is having lunch there, but something far less ritzy than ours.) The view goes on for miles and miles, with the wall winding on the crest as far as the eye can see. However did they build this?! And in such a short period of time! Amazing!!
We climb back down, me still with my mascot, even though she’s already clinched the deal and collected her money. She even insists on carrying the books down for me and is very concerned I don’t fall. I tell her good-bye and could almost kiss her. She was the nicest of all her “colleagues”.
The bus ride back is uneventful, but the police are stopping some cars. Stanley explains that if you’re not registered in Beijing, you can’t just drive in; you have to have obtained an authorization. It’s to keep out the “dangerous people”, Stanley tells me. (You also can’t drive in Beijing on all days, just some, depending on your license number. And yet the traffic jams...!)
I’m not hungry. Just tired. And we have another big day tomorrow. So to bed!
(As an addendum, this article on the Great Wall from National Geographic: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/03-04/the-great-wall-of-china/)
No comments:
Post a Comment