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Walking China's Great Wall
On his epic journey along China’s Great Wall, John Man arrives in Lanzhou
The Great Wall near Beijing is such a monumental curtain of stone that many think it runs like that all across north China.
In fact, the Great Wall is not a single wall, and not all its many bits are great, because much of it is made of rammed earth that is easily eroded, dug or bulldozed out of existence. Once, of course, dynasties defined themselves by building their own versions of the Wall.
One section, built by the Han (206BC-AD220), ran from the far western deserts in Xinjiang, through the narrow Gansu Corridor, the ancient route along the Qilian mountains to central Asia, and then swung south to make a sudden left turn at its most southerly point: Lanzhou.
I had high hopes of Lanzhou, Gansu’s capital, because it had once been a major Silk Road city and a cornerstone of the Han defence line running up to the Gansu Corridor.
Merchants struck north from here, protected by the Wall and the Zhuanglang river, heading for the Corridor and points west. Apparently it had a great museum, with experts to consult.
But no. Lanzhou’s three million people had pretty much buried the past and the museum was closed for renovations. The city’s extraordinary setting, straddling the Yellow River and cradled by very steep mountains, holds pollution as a bowl holds water.
There was a limit to my interest in its iron bridge (the first over the Yellow River, 1910; built by Germans, actually) and the modern (1987) Mother-and-Child statue in pink stone, a symbol of the river nurturing the people. What I wanted was the Wall, as I told my guide, a strapping, broad-faced girl by the name of Sun Chingching.
“But you can call me Christina,” she said. She spoke in formal, phrase-book sentences, with endearing frankness. “My English name was given me by my English teacher because I am a Christian. I believe in God. So he called me Christina.”
There was no trace of the Great Wall in today’s city, but Christina rose to the challenge. She got on the internet, phoned friends and reported back. There was some wall left, after all. We would drive north with an old schoolfriend who knew the area.
Next day she appeared with a slim, studious young man. “His name is Xu Jie. But you can call him Eric. We call him Eric because he has a warm heart. He likes to help people.” No, I didn’t understand the logic either, but it was true. The two together made a perfect team.
Northward, peach trees gave way to gaunt red-brown hills, fog to clear skies, hideous suburbs to the Lanzhou-Wuwei expressway – new, of course, and not on my map.
Eighty kilometres on, we turned into a little place called Yongdeng, where Eric picked up a schoolfriend, a nine-year-old cousin and an aunt, Miss Li, a homely figure in a smart black jacket. It was quite a party, six of us and the driver. We all squeezed into the car, bumped up a side road, and parked by a railway line.
Miss Li led the way across the line and along the grassy edges of little ploughed fields, talking about the Wall. There wasn’t much left – Christina passed on Miss Li’s words – because local people didn’t know much about it. There used to be more, but it had been knocked down and ploughed into fields. Miss Li showed me a coin, and began its story. Her father had found it beside the Wall, with many others, but . . .
She broke off, because there it was, marking the edge of a field along the top of a ravine, guarding nothing but bone-dry, tussocky hills. It was in terrible shape, all gap-toothed bits and pieces, sometimes no more than a metre and a half high, sometimes three metres. Grass sprouted on the top and in odd, eroded corners. It ran for no more than a couple of kilometres. I am sure it had survived only because ploughing it under would have put half the field into the ravine.
We wandered along, like a class of schoolkids on an outing, then descended through a gap into the ravine. It was a storm channel, which might have once acted as a moat, deterring intruders descending from the barren hills. Nowadays, storms were clearly rare, because someone had put a small field down there, now harvested and neatly dug for autumn.
It struck me as pathetic, in the original meaning: a sight full of pathos, a quality that arouses pity. People came here now only to tend fields. The Wall was vanishing year by year, and no one cared.
“Did your teachers bring you here to visit?” I asked Eric’s friend.
“No. No one knew it was part of the Great Wall. We just called it a ‘border wall’.”
And here was I, expending a good deal of time, energy and money to track down this ruin. I felt as if I had stumbled on the last remnants of a species heading towards extinction.
“Is this all there is?” I asked Christina. “On the internet, it said there was more. It is near. Shall we look for it?”
Certainly we should. We dropped off Miss Li and her niece, drove a few kilometres, asked the way, walked up a narrow lane into fields of tomatoes and lettuces, asked again. Well, there was once a bit of the wall three or four li that way – an old man pointed – but it’s all gone now. On the other hand, now he came to think of it . . . and he gave the driver some instructions.
“People don’t know about history,” mourned Christina, as we returned to the car. “They just want to make lots of money. They destroy old things, and build new ones.”
“The trouble is,” I said, “that it’s only earth.” “I think it is very important to us.” She resumed her formal role as guide and guardian of China’s traditions. “It is a symbol of our national spirit. But I think people round here, they do not agree with me.”
We manoeuvred backwards, past a tractor-trailer so completely covered with straw that it looked like a mobile haystack, and continued on our way beside fields, along a canal, and through a village. It was rather a fine village, with a concrete road, new houses and well-kept fields. We stopped at a school, the Ma Jia Wan Primary School, built in 1996. This was promising, because the back wall of the compound was actually a bit of the Great Wall, four metres high, solid, and neatly topped with new tiles. Surely there was more. Two men with catastrophic teeth and glasses as big as headlights gave more directions. On we went. Beneath our wheels, concrete gave way to dry mud.
And there, suddenly, was a sight to make the day worthwhile: right beside the track stood a single isolated but very solid piece of wall, rearing up in the shape of two giant fins that looked as if they belonged to some buried stegosaurus. True, there were hoe-marks at the base, where someone had gathered barrows of earth. But at least here someone cared, for a plaque, set up in 1981, stated that this was indeed part of the Han Great Wall. You could see the striations where, more than 2,000 years ago, workers had built up their layers of rammed earth. It would not last for ever, but this little section clearly had some way to go.
Even odder than the wall was its setting; for here the track ran through a muddle of ravines and holes and little cliffs, with every flat surface, even the floor of what looked like a dry river, turned into pocket-handkerchief fields, all neatly hoed. The wall was part of the jumble, apparently diving into the ground then reappearing further on. Then, as I climbed about this warren, I saw we were on high ground. Off to one side was a basin of open farmland that rolled over to grey hills about 500 metres away, and in the middle of it were some farm workers.
We made our way over to them to chat. They were tending a family plot marked out by raised earth borders, which also carried little irrigation channels bringing water from a nearby well. They were gathering carrots – big, fat ones. A grandmother with a blue beret took on the role of spokesperson, while a dozen others stopped hoeing to gather round, intrigued by the arrival of a westerner. It was the end of a sunny afternoon, and they were cheerful. I praised the carrots, and asked about the harvest.
“It is good. This is the second harvest. First, we grow wheat, then we grow carrots. You can try one.”
And they did all this by hand? “Yes, all by hand.” She wiped a huge carrot with a cloth, and handed it to me. “The fields are too small for machines.”
And what about the Wall? I asked through a crunchy mouthful. Was there more of it once? “Several years ago, there was more,” Christina reported, “but – ” She checked herself, and asked more questions. There was a quick flurry of conversation. These people knew about the Wall, and its significance. “She says it was the rain. It was not destroyed by the people, because the government forbids them. They are not allowed to gather earth from the Great Wall. Please, she says, take more carrots, if you like.”
“I would like to thank you,” said Christina as we made our way back to the Wall and the car. “Without you, I would not have come here. I am a city girl. I did not know that carrots are harvested in autumn.”
Extracted from The Great Wall by John Man, published by Bantam Press at £20. To buy it for the reduced price of £18, with free p&p in the UK, call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
Travel details: specialist tour operators can organise trips to the Great Wall, either as a day trip from Beijing or as part of a tailor-made journey to central China. Try Cox & Kings (020 7873 5000, www.coxandkings.co.uk), CTS Horizons (020 7836 4338, www.ctshorizons.com) or Silk Road and Beyond (020 7371 3131, www.silkroadandbeyond.co.uk).
