He who has not climbed the Great
Wall is not a true man.
Mao Zedong
There are several places within reach of Beijing to see The Wall. Many places offer tours that take you to jade factories or Chinese medicine shops so we chose to go by public transport to a lesser visited site and avoid the shopping tourist trap. We will also be able to see The Wall again from the train on our first leg towards the Gobi desert.
The day was surprisingly clear so we had some reasonable views and there weren't too many tourists as there were lots of empty bus parks. The temperature was between 27-30C so it was hot.
Many of these popular sites are planned so that you enter through lines of stalls selling souvenirs and all the way they are pushing T-shirts or postcards in your face shouting hello, hello. The stalls here were selling dried fruits as the Mutianyu area surrounding The Wall is covered with fruit and nut trees. They would look gorgeous in autumn.
The 'original' wall was begun over 2000 years ago and separate walls that had been constructed to keep out marauding nomads, were linked together. An estimated 180 million cubic metres of rammed earth was used in the core of the wall and probably the bones of deceased workers.
It is said that sentries were bribed so it didn't work to keep out the nomads but it was a useful elevated highway to move goods about. Wolves' dung was burnt in the beacon towers to send smoke signals of enemy movements.
There were parts of the wall that we saw that are overgrown and crumbling and if it wasn't for the tourists I guess there would be more overgrown sections. The rebuilding of many sections is sponsored by international companies.
In 2003, China's first astronaut Yang Liwei said that he could not see the wall from space and it is not visible from the moon. The myth is to be edited from Chinese textbooks, where it has cast its spell over generations of Chinese.
We took a cable car up to the top and sat in a car that Bill Clinton used when he visited the wall.
