Being in China still feels like a vacation since I’m still in orientation. We ride busses everywhere in a great gaggle of American students with two adults looking out for us. We’re staying in a fancy hotel on the outskirts of the city.
(a blue sky day!)
Still, we’re often let loose and left to fend for ourselves, which is where the little victories come in.
I had a Chinese tutor for a few months this past year, but for the most part, I’m self-taught with a combination of DIY Mandarin books and an epic ton of Chinese movies.
So when I manage to do something entirely in Mandarin with minimal gesturing, I feel awesome. For example, we stopped briefly at the 798 Art Zone yesterday and there were a ton of little shops selling something in white jars covered with paper that you poked a straw through. I managed to ask what it was, understand the answer (yoghurt), inquire about the price, and then buy one. And on top of that, it was seriously delicious. I’ve also managed to order a latte in Chinese, because my tutor taught me all the important coffee words that a textbook would never include.
As for the big victories…
We climbed the Great Wall today at sunrise. If you look in the far distance of the photograph, there are little squares on top of the hills. We hiked to one of those. Possibly the second or third.
There were a lot of extremely vertical parts where clumps of us stopped to rest for a bit. Really, I label hiking the Great Wall a big victory, but the wall completely dominated us, without question. The bottoms of my feet still hurt, and its been fifteen hours.
We went from newly restored sections like the one above to the more rundown parts where the watchtowers were mostly rubble and the wall itself had no barrier around the edge and grass growing between all the rocks.
In America, we refer to the Great Wall as just that: a great wall, spanning all of China. We imagine it to be this massive fortification, the biggest public works project in the history of ever.
In fact, the wall wasn’t built from scratch. During the Qin dynasty, Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di unified many smaller walls that already existed. (Our tour guide explained that Qin is for the dynasty name and Shi Huang Di actually means unifier, because Qin Shi Huang was the first ruler to unite China under his dynasty.)
A lot of the wall has been reduced to rubble and wasn’t made of much to begin with.* Where we went, Jinshanling (literally Golden Mountain Ridge), is one of the more famous parts, and therefore in pretty good shape for most of the way.
If you’re looking to hike the Great Wall, I would highly recommend this part because it’s less crowded than the more popular Badaling. Jinshanling is about 2 1/2 hours out of Beijing as well, so the stars are absolutely incredible.
At this point in the wall (maybe across the whole thing after unification) there were sentries posted at every single gap, and the wall is bent in strategic places to protect the people standing guard there.
Parts of the wall were low enough that you could climb over them and walk around on the actual mountain the wall was built on.
At this point, a few of us climbed over and joined them, which prompted the people up there to take pictures of us. Particularly when this happened:
Which I’m sure does wonders for cross-cultural exchange and informal diplomacy. I also had my ukulele with me, which was a target of interest for many people.
What I loved best about the Great Wall** though was not the (mythical) idea that it spans all of China in a strong, unified way, but that people have been walking these walls for hundreds and hundreds of years: soldiers, for whom the wall was built; Mongolians, for whom the wall was built to keep out; and tourists, for whom the wall is maintained.
That’s true of China as a whole, though. Thousands of years of history has been taking place on these grounds, sometimes in these buildings, and this country will probably see thousands of more years and look just as different then as it does now when compared to ancient China.
Next time, I’ll be writing about the 798 Art Zone and moving into the apartment (which is where I’m writing this from right now!)
*There’s a lot of information about the dilapidated western parts of the Great Wall in Peter Hessler’s Country Driving, which is Hessler’s book on roadtripping China following the Great Wall.
**For really comprehensive information about the Great Wall, see David Spindler‘s work.
Another Goddamn China Blog 
