The Great Wall of China

Driving about 2 hours into Beijing's suburbs we reached Changping on June 3rd.

This was the day we had been waiting eagerly for i.e. to see the Great Wall of China. Henry Norman said in 1895 that the Great Wall of China was the only work of human hands on the globe visible from the moon.

Arriving at the Great Wall entrance of Mutianyu, a 1.3 mile walk and the most scenic of all the 5,500 mile wall, this Wall truly earns its name as one of the world's wonders. 
  The Mutianyu entrance is not as popular with tourists as Badaling or the Juyongsuan passes which latter 2 passes offering more shopping stops along the way). However it is the only pass that offers a cable chair ride to the top and the option of taking the cable chair down at RM40 per person or a long winding but steep slide down (like the slide in a theme park scooped out of the sides of the mountains in the shape of a long half opened steel trench). 

This pass is about 2.5 km long with 22 watch towers and a beautiful valley on the sides of the Wall.

One could also walk down  the Wall on a steady pair of legs which walk would take about 45 minutes.

Many many people climbed this part of the Wall due to its beauty and majesty. We opted to take the cable chair both ways but were given time to take photographs of the Wall at the Mutianyu pass. Mutianyu side of the Wall is built on lofty, craggy mountain tops. Standing at one of the watch tower, one can see the imposing structure stretching miles and miles over the mountains. 

The images of the parapets, watch towers, narrow stone staircases, castle-like top edges of the Wall are indeed hard to forget. It would take more than 5 months to walk the this amazing structure from end to end. Vendors dressed in Mao-like uniforms sell drinks and tidbits at certain sections of the Wall calling out "cold", "beer" and offering to take pictures of tourists.

My first impression of seeing this Wall was that the Chinese are truly gifted engineers!

No wonder all over the world today China is building bridges, tunnels and highways. I guessed I have never truly appreciated the greatness of Chinese engineering as I did that day standing on the Great Wall of China and surveying its vast expanse. Now I know why the Penang government awarded the contract to Chinese engineers to build the underground tunnel across the straits of Butterworth. Chinese engineering is something else!

I have seen the leaning tower of Pisa, the Eiffel tower, the Coliseum, the Taj Mahal but I can only say that the Great Wall surpassed them in natural ruggedness and beauty. 

It may be easy to build on flat land but it must have been a difficult and monumental task to build on mountainous terrain.

The Great Wall is made of fortifications of stones, bricks, rammed earth, wood. It spans 8,850 km with 6,259 km of actual wall, 359 km of trenches and 2,232 km of natural defensive areas.

Conceived by Shih Huang Ti around 220 - 206 BC, the Wall was built to protect the Chinese empire against nomads or barbarians. However the Mongols later penetrated into the certain portions of the Wall.

The majority of the Wall was reconstructed during the Ming dynasty and repaired and reconstructed ruing the Han, Sui and the northern dynasties.

The Wall stretched from Shanhaiguan in the east to Lop Lake in the West and roughly delineates the southern edge of Inner Mongolia.

About 1 million workers died building the Wall. Many bodies of the dead workers were eventually buried into the Wall. 

If not for my knee guard, I would not have been able to climb the Wall. I had also spent about a month preparing for this climb exercising at least twice a week for 30 minutes in my office gym! 

Certain parts of the small stony stairs are steep and narrow, other parts are steep to climb. The uneven texture of the ground is a challenge to any 'aged' climber like me!