Wild Wall-The Jiankou Years

By William Lindesay

After William Lindesay's 2,500 km journey along the Great Wall in 1987 and marriage to 'Beautiful Jade', as told in Wild Wall-The Foundation Years, the couple settled in Beijing and Lindesay, born in Lancashire, remade himsel as the great protector of the Great Wall of China, fending off developers and litterbugs and devoting his life to raising

• Language: English
• Publisher: Earnshaw Books Ltd
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9789888769742

Book preview

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Also by William Lindesay

Wild Wall–The Foundation Years

Great Wall, Beautiful Jade: My China Loves

The Great Wall in 50 Objects

The Great Wall Explained

The Great Wall Revisited

Images of Asia: The Great Wall

Marching with Mao: A Biographical Journey

Alone on the Great Wall

Wild Wall–The Jiankou Years

By William Lindesay

ISBN-13: 978-988-8769-74-2

© 2022 William Lindesay

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY

EB156

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in material form, by any means, whether graphic, electronic, mechanical or other, including photocopying or information storage, in whole or in part. May not be used to prepare other publications without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information contact [e-mail]

Published by Earnshaw Books Ltd. (Hong Kong)

To James Lindesay and Thomas Lindesay

Samuel Johnson tried to persuade James Boswell, with whom he toured the Hebrides, to go to China to walk the Great Wall, despite concerns about leaving behind his children. Johnson argued that the benefits of the journey—‘an enlarged mind’ and ‘acquisition of dignity of character’—would more than compensate for his long absence, and ‘raise his children to eminence’, ‘reflect a lustre of spirit and curiosity in them’ and distinguish them ‘as children of a man who had gone to view the Great Wall of China’.

Jim and Tommy: many of the stories in this book recount your foundation years at the Wall—as early risers, inquisitive historians, animated guides, ardent conservationists and accomplished documentary filmmakers. Over two decades, along the thousands of kilometres of the Great Wall’s ways that we have travelled together, I have realised that ‘Wall fever’ (in the words of Alfred Wainwright) is not only an affliction that is a ‘healthy and rewarding pursuit’, but might actually be hereditary. The condition has reached new heights through your own desires to measure the Wall with your own footsteps. I look forward to being distinguished as the father of men who have also gone on foot along the Great Wall of China. All for Wall!

Who are we if we cannot reach the Great Wall?

—Mao Zedong, 1935

Who are we if we cannot cherish the Great Wall?

—William Lindesay, 2004

Foreword

By Dame Barbara Woodward DCMG OBE

The days and nights I have spent with William, Qi and his family at their farmhouse in the shadow of the Great Wall at Jiankou are among the most vivid and memorable of my life, and of my years in China. Whether we were around the fire in the winter, nestling mugs of hot tea and jostling for space on the sofa with Hadrian (the black Labrador, William’s 60th birthday gift) or sitting under the stars of a summer evening sky with the breeze gently rustling the leaves of the ginkgo trees in the courtyard and the jagged outline of the Wall just visible in the hills beyond, William’s stories of his adventures on the Wall have held me and his many guests entranced.

In this book, William tells the second part of his extraordinary story. Following his solo run along the Great Wall and marriage to Qi, they return to China with their first born, Jimmy, and begin in earnest to preserve and protect the Great Wall—the Wild Wall—of China, to research and share its story. It is a story of highs—meeting the Queen and the award of an OBE and recognition in China for his conservation work as the founder of International Friends of the Great Wall, but also of challenges overcome, of peasants throwing bricks with deadly aim at visiting philanthropists, and of a very real brush with death in the Gobi Desert. 

Woven through all this is a telling of China’s social history as the family, joined by Tommy born in 2000 and Hadrian the dog in 2016, experience life in fast-growing China through the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and during the worst of the ‘airpocalypse’. 

We meet too the ‘terrible and terrific’ guests who have visited the farmhouse over two decades: from the worse-is-better Spartans to Joanna Lumley ‘as beautiful inside as she is outside’. Spoiler alert: the Dutch stand out as the best guests. 

William writes with a photographer’s eye for detail and light, an historian’s precision with facts and a novelist’s talent for dialogue. He weaves a narrative which shows ‘why the Great Wall became my life and why it should be a place in your lifetime, at least once’. 

More than that, as William reflects on saving the life of Qi Juan, a 19-year-old hiker who sustained a serious head injury having fallen off the Wall down a ravine, he resolves to ‘live life to the full with the whole family’. For William, of course, the Wall is family. He writes: ‘As soon as you have children you start worrying about many aspects of their future, and so I did with Jiankou’. The Wall, for William, has been ‘a physical, political and romantic endeavour’. 

There is, too, an important underlying message in this book: in an Age of Distraction (as he calls it), only when we stay focussed, dedicated and persistent can we achieve great things. William is indeed Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog. He remains as ‘unashamedly super excited’ about the Wall in the 2020s as he was in the 1980s. His focus and single-mindedness, honed through his early family life in Wallasey and the discipline and dedication required for sporting excellence remain with him and are as evident in this eighth book as they were in the first.

William has found his destiny in China’s Great Wall and its silent stones could not have a more eloquent spokesperson. The man and the Wall are inseparable: ‘this theatre, my habitat, this enclave of antiquity, my home, this little piece of heaven and history’. 

I am delighted that, in this inspiring book, William has shared his life of adventure and the adventure of his life; his story of the Wall and of his family’s life in China and his true passion for life itself, with all its triumphs and setbacks. 

Further away now from the Great Wall than I have been at any point in my life, I shall return to these pages to rekindle my memories of my times on the Wall with William, Qi, Jimmy and Tommy. I shall remember William ‘standing alone, high up on the Great Wall, with the whole day before me to walk along my very own section of the world’s most spectacular open-air museum. I need no other vantage point to appreciate the Wall’s true greatness’. I wish William’s many friends and readers around the world the same pleasure.

Dame Barbara Woodward DCMG OBE

British Ambassador to China, 2015-2020

New York, March 2022

Author’s Introduction

The Great Wall on My Doorstep

The Jiankou Years is the second part of my memoir, Wild Wall. The first book, The Foundation Years tells my Great Wall story from the start, by seeing the battlement symbol of the monument marked in my Oxford School Atlas (circa 1967), via the ‘stepping stones’ of a traverse of Hadrian’s Wall in 1984, to my life-changing adventure in China during 1987 when I succeeded in making a 2,470 km length journey on foot along the Great Wall, and winning my wife-to-be, Qi. On a quest to know the modern history of her country, I then spent the early 1990s retracing highlights of the Red Army’s Long March and visiting places connected to Chairman Mao Zedong’s life and times. The Jiankou Years picks up my story soon after that, in 1994, at another great turning point of my life when Qi and I, with our new baby boy Jimmy, returned to China for me to work at China Daily. I specifically chose Beijing as our place to live so that I could get back to the Great Wall at weekends. I wanted to discover the monument in detail. The Beijing Municipality, which is about the size of Wales, contains almost 400 km of the Great Wall, and getting to know it intimately kept me happily occupied—but unhappily away from Qi and Jimmy, weekend after weekend.

Eager to share the beauty of the Great Wall landscape with my family, we purchased a derelict farmhouse beside the Jiankou section of Wild Wall, and renovated the building. Nestled in a hamlet and surrounded by Wall-tipped mountains on two sides, ‘the farmhouse’ promised to be my paradise, a piece of heaven with history on the doorstep. It is here that I started to appreciate what the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) wrote in his essay ‘The Parish and the Universe’: ‘To know even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience, it is depth that counts, not width’.

My field contains just ten of the Ming Great Wall’s 8,851 kilometres. But they count as ten of its very best, a microcosm where I’d get to know the Wall’s many faces. The best faces are its antiquity and sublime beauty, combined. The worst are trash, graffiti, and the constant threats of ‘development’.

Jiankou is the place where I built my WildWall lifestyle. It is where I have spent a quarter of a century of my life. It is where I saw the Wall in depth, and foresaw the Wall in future, where I pioneered an exemplar set of the first Wild Wall protection measures. During these Jiankou years I set off from the farmhouse leading walks, hundreds of times with guests in tow, to see short sections of the same Wall, yes, but in different seasons, at different times and in different lights and weathers, learning from repetition, because nothing happens twice. Every brick, block, stretch or section of the Wall is but a stepping-stone leading to the next one, and so I was lured to see more, the uncountable ‘width’, which in the case of the Wall is its length, the land of the Great Wall. I set off from Jiankou to go to different sections of the same Ming Wall that lay beyond to the west and behind to the east, and to go to other, older dynastic Great Walls that were built before.

I hope that you enjoy this recollection of my Jiankou years.

William Lindesay

Xizhazi Village, Beijing

March 2022

Wild Wall: Noun; abbreviated, common form of Wilderness Wall, being lengths of the Great Wall of China’s ramparts that have fallen into ruins and become overgrown since their redundancy as a national defence in the mid 17th Century. Origin: Term coined by British geographer William Lindesay in 1994.

Huanghuacheng; sketch by John Macdonald, 1997.

Prologue

The Making of Wild Wall

I have long pondered the evolution of Wild Wall, the transformation of the Great Wall from an operational to a defunct defence. The story of the Ming Dynasty’s border fortifications being abandoned, becoming overgrown and falling into ruins all began with the collapse of the dynasty, the fall of its last emperor. This cataclysmic event occurred over a brief few months.

It was February 8th, 1644: the Jiashen Year of the Chongzhen Emperor’s reign, the first dawn in the Lunar New Year of the Monkey. Red sunlight filtered through the blanket of smoke hanging over the city of Beijing, bathing the yellow-glazed roof tiles of the Imperial Palace with a faint yet warm glow. Behind the palace’s iced moat and high perimeter wall manned by archers, a ceremony to welcome the Spring Festival was planned in accordance with traditions. The auspicious day’s proceedings were due to begin with a grand gathering at the heart of the so-called Forbidden City, within Huangjidian, the Hall of Imperial Supremacy.

It was the 276th year of the Great Ming’s continuous rule over China since the dynasty’s founder Zhu Yuanzhang had ousted the Mongols in 1368. As feared, the day, the year, started badly. Customarily, scores of court and government officials, military commanders, princes and dukes would assemble inside the vast hall to receive his majesty’s greetings, but most of those invited had not turned up. Eunuchs swarmed around, amused, jostling as stand-ins, eager to make up the numbers. Phalanxes of soldiers stood outside in the courtyard space behind lines of standard bearers, bemused at witnessing the debacle. The ceremony ended up being cancelled.

Next, the day’s most important ritual, at Tai Miao, the Imperial Ancestral Temple, was plunged into chaos by the late arrival of horses to convey the emperor’s entourage. To cap an already disastrous day a strong wind blew down from the Mongolian Gobi in the north. It turned gale force and choked the city in a suffocating sandstorm.

The Chongzhen Emperor’s prayers in successive years, asking for an end to the long drought, for rains to come, for crops to grow and be gathered in had fallen on deaf ears. Fate was closing in on the emperor, his court, government, army and everything in his domain—all under heaven—from several directions. Out of the sky and up from the ground, from the southwest and the northeast. In any normal year the emperor would receive a steady stream of ‘memorials’—urgent reports couriered to the palace from concerned officials in the provinces—telling of local hardships that required his personal attention. They were quite expected. His benevolent majesty typically solved such problems by ordering release and distribution of grain from the granaries, or by waiving taxes. But since 1641 the quantity of memorials received had escalated, from everywhere. The empire’s granaries were now empty, and so were the imperial coffers. The Ming was facing an unprecedented crisis. A conspiracy by heaven and earth appeared to be orchestrating the dynasty’s downfall.

Dry desert air from the north had kept the rains away, year after year, and the emperor was seen as being responsible. History would record the dry period from 1641-45 to be the Chongzhen Great Drought. To the south of Beijing, the lower reaches of the Yellow River, once a landscape of neat fields, had not recovered from a disaster that struck almost a century earlier. Another emperor was named and blamed for it. The Jiajing Earthquake of 1556 had ruptured the Yellow River’s dykes and canals, an integrated flood-defence and irrigation system, which, like the Great Wall, had taken generations to build up, and had not since been repaired. Ravaged by famine, the devastated region became a hotbed of discontent. Peasants believed the mayhem reflected imperial incompetence.

As the calamitous Lunar New Year’s Day ceremonies were unfolding in Beijing, auguring the Chongzhen Emperor’s loss of power, quite a different ceremony was taking place in Xi’an. The rebel Shun Dynasty had been established with the accession of Li Zicheng as its founder and king.

Li Zicheng would soon lead his army of peasants northeast towards Beijing, aiming to overthrow the Ming. Remarkably another army had the very same ambition. Beyond the Great Wall in the northeast, the Manchus, who had eclipsed the fragmenting Mongols as the main outsider challenge to Ming imperial stability, were poised to launch an attack to break through the border defences on the coastal plain at Shanhaiguan.

Throughout Chinese history, dynasties had typically fallen for one of three reasons. At times, revolts by court officials, ministers or generals usurped power. More often, it was a rebellion by peasants suffering famine in the heart of the empire that led to dynastic downfall. On several occasions, invasions by ‘barbarians’ from beyond the northern frontier won power. In the spring of 1644 a peasant rebellion and a barbarian invasion were happening at the same time.

Seventy kilometres due north of the Imperial Palace stood the highest and widest sections of the Ming’s frontier defence that centuries later would become familiar to the world as the Great Wall. This stone dragon stretched east, all the way to Shanhaiguan. Along this military zone rumours were running rife. March had been an unusual month for the military families that were operating and extending the Wall to the north of the capital. There were none of the usual deliveries of grain at the end of the bitter winter, nor a word about upcoming ministerial inspections, nor any imperial messengers. Construction corps would normally start their extension, upgrading and repair work on an auspicious day in spring, but in March there were still no plans to begin. By the end of April, it was widely believed that the Chongzhen Emperor had been killed during the ransacking of Beijing. More incredulous was the receipt of a report, a ‘linear’ relayed by messengers originating from the Great Wall’s seaside terminus at Shanhaiguan. Additional to its main purpose of functioning as a barrier, the Wall worked as a signalling line for sending military information. Despite the message’s reliable means of delivery, the majority of Wall people doubted that Shanhaiguan’s commander would be so treasonous as to open the gates within the Wall to allow Manchu cavalrymen to pass through. How could the message be verified as genuine, the Wall people asked? True or false, their ranks were divided, and all of them were demoralised. The believers refused to go on watch duty in the towers. ‘What’s the use of a border defence if the enemy has already been let inside?’ they asked.

The doubters of the news, much to the ridicule of the believers, continued to make their way up the steep mountain paths between village and Wall to go on watch. The highest of their strategic lookouts were perched on the peaks of the ridge, more than one thousand metres above the North China Plain. On pristine mornings, golden sunlight could be seen spotlighting the roofs of the Imperial Palace, while on windless winter days the imperial city was often marked by a pall of black smoke hanging in the sky like a limp banner.

Early June brought clear and warm weather. Seen from the Wall, the sight of the gleaming palace gave the men in the towers confidence that all was well in the capital, until mid-morning on June 5th. It was then that guards saw plumes of black smoke rising from the city. ‘Shang lai! Beijing shao le!’ (Come up! Beijing’s burning!) they called, before sending runners down to the village in the valley below. All the Wall people wanted to see it for themselves. They ran and climbed, men and women, young and old, to stand on the Wall, look south and read the news with their own eyes. A huge cloud of black smoke crowned Beijing. The capital was ablaze. Right there and then they knew it was the end of the life they and their ancestors had known. The raw details of what had happened in recent months would take longer to reach this sidestepped frontier.

Trapped between two enemies, General Wu Sangui of Shanhaiguan had brokered an alliance with the Manchus to put down Li Zicheng’s army, which retreated to Beijing. At the approach of the honed Manchu cavalry the peasant rebels fled the imperial city, burning its wooden buildings as they went. The Manchus became the new rulers of China. They established the Qing Dynasty. Chongzhen, the last emperor to rule a China protected by a Great Wall, had committed suicide months earlier, on April 24th.

The last watch from the Wall had finished on June 5th. To continue to stand on duty on the Wall might be seen as dissent against the new masters of China, so the Wall guards, whose forebears had built the Wall, went down to their villages, never to return to it as defenders. Their next ascents would be for entirely different reasons, to salvage anything that was useful.

A new era in the Great Wall’s story had begun. It would be abandoned and ridiculed as a defence by the Qing, and be left at the mercy of Mother Nature and Old Father Time. The Wall families, every member of them, from aged grandparents to young children, had only ever known the Wall life. Each had been born within sight of the rising, lengthening and strengthening dragon. None of them had ever strayed far from it, and in death their ancestors were buried in the valleys below it. They all had an umbilical connection to it, and even now, with no Great Ming, no Imperial Majesty and no Highly Respected General they could not leave their land. It dawned upon them they would have to make their own decisions and fend for themselves. They too had suffered poor yields in their fields south of the rampart, but they had an alternative. They could live well by hunting and trapping north of the Wall, chengwai, on the sparsely populated land where Han settlers had always been reluctant to go for fear of being the first to face the Hun, despite government subsidies and assurances for their safety. Unanimously the Wall people chose to eke out their livings within sight of their familiar home. They demobilised themselves. They decommissioned the Wall themselves. In evacuating the Wall they were game to take anything of practical use or future value. They and their own had built it. It was their resource to plunder.

Carrying things down was much easier than it had been carrying things up. Towers were emptied of their utility contents, from glazed water storage vessels and jars used for storing grain to boxes of arrows. Doors and shutters of oak required more effort, but most troublesome were the engraved tablets, chenggongbei. Some bore the names of local commanders who were dead, so their sons or grandsons wanted the inscribed tablets as their memorials. Crow bars were normally used during the Wall-building season to lever blocks over the ground. Now they were used to gouge out the inscribed tablets. Within weeks, most of use and value had been taken.

Over the next few years, decades and centuries the Wall saw very few people. They only climbed up to it now as they crossed over it, on hunting expeditions outside the Wall where game was more abundant, or to use it as a pathway to the east, to the west. During these vicissitudes of time it was nature rather than people that changed the Wall’s appearance.

The second part of the story concerning the making of Wild Wall is not human, but natural. It has been an ongoing process, annually, since 1644.

Each year in spring winds carried loess from the north, depositing a veneer on the pavement of the Wall. Every summer, heavy rain poured down, seeping through joints between bricks and cracks in the rocks. Autumn gales carried seeds to settle. In winter, any moisture within the Wall’s body expanded, slowly prizing out huge blocks, millimetres per year to produce bulges on its containing walls. The next year the same cycle occurred. Seeds that had settled well between the cracks waited patiently for a few degrees of warmth and few drops of moisture to trigger their germination. Within a couple of years the growth and height of the midsummer weeds completely covered the square-shaped bricks of the Wall’s pavement. Within decades, after the last surviving Wall guards and builders had died, some areas were covered by a thin layer of earth created by annual plant decay that enriched the loess to become more nutrient-rich, a true earth, to be colonised by bushes and saplings. Within a century, trees as tall as the battlements themselves stood on the surface of the Wall.

As well as the slow and relentless wilding of the Wall there were occasional, sudden events wrought by nature’s more violent character. Summer thunderstorms brought lightning bolts to strike the highest parts of the Wall, the sentry towers that crowned watchtowers on the peaks, causing roof guardians (small animal figurines), tiles, walls and all to crash down. Downpours could be so torrential and prolonged that the surface of the Wall became sodden, awash. Earth and plants blocked gutter bricks and water spouts, causing water to pool in hollows and seep down through the pavement, into the fill. In winter the expansive force of this moisture freezing was so great that it could push blocks out, leaving them poised to fall. All that was needed was a jolt to free them, to cause a collapse. The first regional earthquake came in 1679, epicentred just fifty kilometres away. The Sanhe Earthquake is estimated to have been of level eight on the Richter Scale. Battlements fell flat onto the Wall pavement. Whole sections of the Wall, undermined by unstable bases, slipped and cascaded down the mountain, mowing down trees that had started to recolonise the slopes, with some blocks rolling hundreds of metres downhill. Another big shock was in 1976. The Great Tangshan Earthquake impacted a much older, more decrepit Great Wall, causing many more collapses and rockfalls, returning blocks and bricks from battlement to mountainsides and gullies, restoring order back to chaos.

The third part of the Wild Wall story is personal. It occurred over a matter of minutes in October 1994. Seven years after making my journey on foot along the length of the Ming Wall in 1987, I took a job in Beijing at the English language newspaper China Daily. From autumn 1994 I started to make regular weekend excursions to the Wall, by bicycle.

On Monday mornings in the office, colleagues both Chinese and foreign alike, would typically chat about their weekends. How about you William, what did you do at the weekend?

I went to the Wall, the Great Wall.

William always goes to the Great Wall! someone said.

I’m a Beijinger and I only go when I have to, taking out-of-town relatives, another chipped in.

Yes, it’s so crowded, touristy and boring.

It hardly seemed that we were talking about the same Great Wall. My weekends were remote, wild and fascinating. I didn’t see anyone up on the Wall the whole time, I responded. I’ll show you some of my photographs when they’re printed.

A few days later my colleagues gathered around, scrutinising the photos, and they were clearly surprised.

It’s bushy … and fallen down, commented one. I’ve never seen the Great Wall looking like this.

It needs fixing, said another.

"Well, as you may know, the Ming Dynasty fell in 1644. The new dynasty, the Qing, didn’t operate the Wall … they just left it … and you can see from these photographs how nature has changed it in the last 350 years … it’s become a wilderness Wall … I suppose you could call it ‘Wild Wall’ … it’s very different from the ‘Tourist Wall’ that’s been rebuilt."

Good explanation of the differences, thanks William. I learned a new specialist term from you today—‘Wild Wall’ ….

I

Back to the Wall

(1994-1998)

1

My Year At China Daily

I had returned to China for the Great Wall, but I had to go to work. Our new family life began in a cosy 13th floor apartment within the China Daily (CD) compound on Huixin East Street, located about 8 km north of the Forbidden City in Beijing. Although it wasn’t as convenient as university life in Xi’an (where I had taught English for the previous three years) everything we needed was quite handy. There were shops right outside the compound gate, the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) with its running track just across the road, and the Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital only five minutes’ walk down the street. Delicacies that had been seasonal treats in Xi’an, such as ‘Beijing cheese’, croissants, wholesome bread and real butter could be found in the Friendship Store, which was twenty minutes’ ride away in a new style vehicle swarming along the streets. The yellow miandi, a micro-van shaped like a loaf of bread, was Beijing’s nippy, convenient and compactly-designed mode of taxi transport. The boon for us was its sliding passenger door, large enough to take the baby in the stroller without the need to collapse it. Priced at a very affordable 10 yuan for the first 10 km, we could flag down a miandi in minutes, clamber inside within 30 seconds, and be off.

I was off to work anew, the greenhorn again, just as I had been in the oilfield and on university campus, but this time in a newsroom where the ‘foreign experts’ sat side by side, all in front of their own computer monitor, each rattling a keyboard in sudden bursts of typing that sounding like machine-gun fire. It was an intimidating atmosphere, and sound. Apparently, I was the first ‘expert’ without the normally required journalistic background that China Daily had ever employed. I had got my job because I was the author of two books and had passed an examination—of sorts. For practical reasons though, because I was living 1,200 km away in Xi’an at the time of my application, I had been allowed to sit the exam remotely, self-supervised. Home advantage was a decisive factor in my success. The referee allowed the examinee a generous period of extra time to complete his 2.5 hours’ editing quota—and he duly got the job. Now it was time for my true test, on my first shift, starting with keyboard grappling. I had only ever used a word processor before, briefly, and that was years ago.

When a Chinese reporter completed his or her report or feature story in English, they sent it to a foreign expert for copy-editing. Our brief was to correct the language, improve it when necessary or if time permitted, but not to alter the meaning of the writer’s original work. These guidelines were relaxed somewhat when working on feature stories, where content was less likely to be politically sensitive.

Easing me into the copy editing process on my first shift was Paul Kane, a bearded twenty-something American who had previously worked for a large newspaper in Philadelphia. He gave me this sage advice: read everything through at the start, check when the deadline is, note the maximum word count, and most importantly, ‘don’t spend a dollar when you can spend a dime’, or in plain English, cut out any waffle. One thing he didn’t stress was the need to press ‘Save’ every now and then. Losing an edited feature cost me my first lunch hour. But the mistake was never repeated.

Before long though I got up to speed. Meanwhile Qi and I were in overdrive in our new roles as parents. My days began at dawn, washing nappies (imported disposable ones were available, but expensive). Next came an enjoyable hour, pushing little Jimmy out in the stroller to the UIBE running track, where I usually managed a run while he napped, before pushing him back home ready for me to start the day’s work. The parenting regime, where short periods of sleep became our norm, greatly toughened us up.

Nobody was the latest newcomer for very long at China Daily. This was a consequence of an unwritten rule that limited the employment of foreign experts to a term of twelve months only. One explanation was believed to have historical roots: since the Han Dynasty, governments had implemented a ‘rule of avoidance’ that prohibited personnel from serving in one place for too long, or serving where other family members also served, or serving among too many people from the same place. A more plausible practical interpretation of the one-year-rule was that it stopped the foreigners from becoming too familiar with the work, the workings of the organisation, and their colleagues of the opposite sex, thus causing a foreign affairs office (waiban) headache. Another theory was that new blood was more courteous, conscientious and careful than tired, bored and China-cynical old timers.

One new CD arrival proved to be abrasive from the start. He kicked-up a fuss from the moment he stepped off the plane. When he was taken to the waiban office to sign his contract, he read it, pulled out a red pen from his pocket and began to edit it. He had taken umbrage at being referred to as a ‘polisher’ in a sub-clause detailing duties. I’m not signing that! insisted Phil Mulvey to an astonished Mr. Wang. First, it’s not English, and besides, you advertised for journalists. I am a journalist, that’s why I’m here. If I let you call me a ‘polisher’ you could order me to clean shoes … or silver! he ranted in his Glaswegian accent.

Phil was right. China Daily had advertised for ‘Copy Editors’. The job description stated that the minimum requirements were the possession of an honour’s degree and twelve months’ working experience as a journalist. I had signed my contract without making a fuss, but Phil’s reaction—which he described to me in detail on a long train journey—was indicative of the wordsmith’s character as a species. I had found teachers to be quiet and timid, concerned mainly with their ulterior motives, but the experts employed at CD were a different bunch altogether. They were highly opinionated and idealistic. Most had training and experience in Western media, where investigative reporting was at the core. They had started on the beat, looking for stories, sniffing out conflicts, and were used to presenting bad news. And they never forgot what their professors had taught them.

The golden rule of good journalism is that any story should be told through multiple sources, otherwise it might be labelled as self-promoting, one-sided and spurious—propaganda. And that’s what the issue boiled down to for many of the expert journalists at CD: they felt as if they were part of a propaganda machine, not a news team. CD simply wanted the experts to ‘polish’ their stories, but that didn’t satisfy the professional aspirations of the foreigner journalists who had signed up to work as copy editors. Many soon realised that they had committed themselves to the wrong job, given that CD was state-owned and state-controlled, like all media in China. However, CD was even more strictly controlled. It was the English-language edition of The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s printed mouthpiece. Interestingly, many Chinese CD staff resided in The People’s Daily compound and were transported to the CD compound by bus each day.

I had no such conflicts. Professionally speaking, I had no objection to being a polisher, and the last thing I wanted to be called was a journalist. Once a journalist, you’d always be branded as one in China, and face suspicion and restrictions. As my time at CD progressed, I realised that I was still a teacher, most so when working on Features, teaching by example, showing how stories might be improved and be re-written to become more interesting.

The experts who had the shortest stay were an American couple. They resigned after a couple of weeks. Thereafter, given the opportunity, I’d try to ‘pre-educate’ new arrivals, particularly those who were visibly frustrated by the propaganda overload. I wished to help them understand the quirkiness of the job they’d taken on by sharing some relevant revolutionary history with them.

The Party, I would explain, was founded in 1921. From that date, it fought its way to power, succeeding in 1949, by winning wars, not elections. Every Chinese leader since Mao had observed the same rule of staying the ruler—that anyone against him, or the Communist Party, was not merely an opponent or political opposition, but an enemy, and not to be tolerated. All media existed to serve the paramount leader and the Party. If it’s political, I said, then don’t mess with it, but if it’s the arts, then play your part.

One day I walked into the newsroom to meet the latest recruit, a young man from Colorado named Scott Urban. We got on well together, and before long began talking about cycling, to the Great Wall. It was rumoured that a Giant bicycle store had just opened in Beijing. Giant was then, and perhaps is even now, the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world, with headquarters in Taiwan. We headed downtown to look for our dream bikes.

Despite the miandi revolution, bikes still held their own on Beijing’s streets in 1994, but most people owned a domestically made machine that sold for under 200 yuan. They were black, heavy, and single speed (no gears). After riding for an hour or so, something would almost always need adjusting, oiling, changing, or you’d get a puncture. In Beijing, whatever happened to your bike, wherever you were, you were never more than a few minutes’ walk from the bicycle repair man with his basin of water, and a wide selection of spares. Obviously we needed more reliable bikes to get us to the Wall.

Walking into Giant felt like entering a different bike world. Machines were in every colour except black. They had at least fifteen gears, brakes with cables instead of thick rods, and were made of lightweight materials such as chrome-molybdenum or even aluminium. However, these breeds cost the equivalent of several months’ salary for the average Beijinger at the time. I took an immediate fancy to a ‘Giant Trooper’ model, part standard bike, part tourer, costing 999 yuan, which was more than one week’s salary. It was lightweight, solid, beautifully made and of a quality that I’d dreamed that one day might arrive in China. But it was here now. Scott and I each bought a Trooper.

It was June. Qi and I had already been back in China for almost three months, but I still hadn’t managed to return to the Great Wall. I had numerous excuses. I had work to do, I was a new Dad, and had Chinese characters to learn and write out. Suburban transport was slow and filthy. Long distance bus travel was slow, cramped, wreathed in cigarette smoke, and with floors covered in a pasty-crud of spittle, dog ends and seed shells. Our Giant Troopers promised to spare us all those pains and enable us to be self-sufficient.

A long ride out of the city, north to Changping was a first for both of us. The 80 km round trip was my introduction to long-distance cycling, and Scott’s first experience of cycling in China according to their road rules, or their lack of them. He was shocked at how riders used—or as he put it—abused the road!

They don’t look, turn a head, or stop! he said. Amusing at first, not so funny when they swerve and nearly pull you off. Or am I just being too American? Thinking we do things right. Guess as Chinese they just do things their way, differently in many cases. You must have many examples, Will, Scott mused.

They do many things differently, often think differently, their own way. We’re not quite as different as chalk and cheese, more like chalk and Chinese! I replied.

Take this example, I continued, during one of my earliest hotel stays in Beijing I was in a dormitory room without a shower, so I made my way to the communal one. Back in those days there were no signs in English and I was completely illiterate, and didn’t think, just walked in, and as I started to strip off, I heard screaming and saw—briefly—a beautiful woman! Completely naked, covering up her uppers with her arm and lower with her hand. As she screamed I turned and ran back to my room ….

Wow! said Scott, did it lead to your first arrest?

No, nothing like that. I never saw the woman again. But years later, I told Qi the same story and she gave a fascinating response, which showed how she as a Chinese was thinking. She said, What a stupid woman! She should have covered her face!"

Will! That’s soooo hilarious! howled Scott. Wow, they do think so differently!!

Storytelling helped some kilometres fly by, but it soon became clear that biking wasn’t a totally pain-free escape from buses. Previously I had never really respected cyclists that much as endurance athletes, but I was beginning to now. Hell, with my sweaty, irritated crotch, sore backside, aching wrists, blistered palms and sore balls of my feet, I can see that getting to the Wall and back in a day isn’t going to be easy, I said to Scott.

The closest section of Wall to Beijing was accessible via a road leading due north from Andingmen (Peace and Tranquillity Gate), a long-since demolished gate on the ancient city wall, to Sihai, a village about 70 km away. It passed through the Great Wall at a place called Huanghuacheng, or ‘Yellow Flower Wall’. To make sure of successfully reaching it, we decided to make a mini expedition of it by staying overnight on the Wall. Scott had a sleeping bag and an inflatable ‘Thermarest’ branded sleeping pad. I had the ultralight Mountain Equipment sleeping bag that I’d carried along the Wall in 1987. With this equipment mounting-up, we realised that we needed more bike accessories—luggage panniers as well as helmets and gloves.

As I checked over my Trooper on the Friday evening, packing my new panniers, and preparing a bag of food to grab from the fridge at five in the morning, I sensed a return of the spirit of 1987. A new era at the Great Wall was about to dawn for me.

2

The Return Of ‘Wall Fever’

Heading due north from Xiaotangshan on the Andingmen-Sihai highway, towering poplars beside the road swayed in the dawn breeze. Planted to provide shade, at this early hour the sun outmanoeuvred them, by getting a look in edgeways, from the side, under their canopies, between their trunks, to cast sharp and evenly-spaced shadows on the road ahead of us. The black and bright surface looked corrugated, rather like a cattle grid, and instinctively I felt it should be a bumpy ride, but we cruised smoothly along this piano keyboard to the sweet sounds of our tyres purring and chains gently grinding.

Scott and I had already been in the saddle for two hours up to this point, crossing the 40 km strip of land between Beijing’s newly-built Third Ring Road (marking the edge of the city proper at the time) and the break of plains. The real ride now loomed ahead, into Wall country, through the Yan Mountains. We took our first break.

It felt good to dismount, squat down to stretch my lower back, touch my toes, and refuel after such an early start. Qi had sourced an ideal goodie for us to snack on. It was a Beijing laozi hao, a ‘good old favourite’, more than a biscuit but not quite a cake, comprising a two-bite-sized wedge of mashed red-date paste wrapped within a strip of crumbly shortcrust pastry. We called them ‘date newtons’ and a serving of two or three certainly hit the spot. Well fed, stretched and watered, we stripped off our heavy outer layers ready for our assault on the mountain pass ahead.

We had agreed only to take rest breaks at pre-set places, or at specific ‘kilometre posts’, but for the pass ahead we ambitiously targeted ‘the summit, and not before’. I was running fit but not bike fit, so this was excruciatingly hard work for my back, arms and abs. Glances up and around helped as distractions from the barrage of aches, burns and rubs. What scenery! Under a clear blue sky the jagged pink granite skyline gathered in, and enhancing the sublimity of the scene, just to remind us that we were in China, a pagoda peeped up from a side valley. A side-track was signposted ‘Tiebiyin Shan’, the Silver Mountain Pagodas, because there were indeed several of them. They’d have to wait another time for us because we were now even more set on the top, without pause. We were now using our lowest gears, advancing only just, at tip-toeing speed, out of our saddles, standing on our pedals, bodies leaning forward. Then to our great relief the summit crest came into sight. Passing between concrete revetments daubed with large character slogans, a few tens of metres of road levelled out. I changed up a gear, stopped pedalling and freewheeled over the crest by a few metres, braked and dismounted. Ecstasy and agony! We laid down our bikes in the middle of the empty road, and stood there, still breathing heavily, still aching badly, but gazing with delight at what crowned the distant skyline, a reminder of why I was in China.

There it is! I called, I’ve missed you!

The Great Wall of China. The real thing, gasped Scott, who had only seen the Wall in photographs.

About five km up ahead, as if painted along the ridgelines, the white Wall ran across our field of view. It came down from the summit of a high mountain in the east, and after a few kilometres its route described the shape of an inverted V that looked like the upper jaw bone of a great beast. From there it continued westwards, sometimes highly visible, sometimes lying low.

No matter how much you’ve travelled around the world, I said to Scott, you’ll only see a landscape like this one right here, in these parts. It’s unique to North China. It deserves its own name. I thought for a moment and then said, Wallscape!

Let’s do this! enthused Scott. Jackets on and down this hill!

It was a good call. According to my speedometer, we hit 38 kph freewheeling down the pass into a wide valley of good farmland planted with chestnut orchards.

We were now a few kilometres closer to the Wall. Much more of its detail was visible.

Scott, you see the ‘Gaping Jaw’, the battlements along its right-hand slope look like a saw, a ‘Sawtooth Slope’. Let’s head for that, I said eagerly.

Just south of Huanghuacheng village was a tiny restaurant beside a milestone indicating that we were 61 km from Andingmen. We stopped, ordered bowls of soup noodles, and quizzed the villager-cook about getting to my ‘Sawtooth Slope’.

"There’s a dirt track right at the side here. Cover three li of ground and it’ll take you there … you’ll see ‘characters’ on the Wall there," he said, enigmatically.

We topped up our water supplies. And how about this evening, Will? I reckon we deserve a beer, said Scott.

I agreed. Even a warm one will taste good.

The cart track was rideable for a way, but then we decided not to risk damaging the bikes on the rough ground. We walked and talked instead.

You know Scott, people are always asking me ‘Were you on the actual Wall all the time in 1987?’ Of course I wasn’t. It was always a search. Without detailed maps, looking for the Great Wall is a game of hide and seek. You see it. Approach, reach and then follow it, and then for some reason you lose it, or it loses you. So the game starts again. You keep going, hoping to spot it, regain it, you’re on the lookout for it, and before long, sure enough, there it is! It’s always great to get back because you know that the Great Wall will always give you a surprise.

The track led us directly to a squarish ancillary building constructed of large granite blocks, probably a barracks, before continuing through the Wall via a damaged archway at the foot of the long ‘Sawtooth Slope’. We garrisoned our Troopers in the barracks and transferred our gear from panniers to backpacks for the ascent. Laden with bags, the Sawtooth looked far too steep and rubble-strewn to tackle directly. I spotted a track heading up a gully, through an orchard of chestnut trees, which seemed to make its way towards the Wall to the left of the Sawtooth Slope.

Our orchard approach proved a good choice. It was a path established by regular use, trampled by local peasants who still made their way up to the Wall, which they used as a pedestrian highway through the mountains.

I’m curious how we will actually get up onto the Wall, remarked Scott.

That’s your answer! I replied, pointing to a perfectly preserved arched entranceway and steps that afforded direct access to the rampart.

What?! exclaimed Scott. How come they built holes in the defence?

You see, we’re on the inside, where the Wall-builders’ villages were established. Once they’d completed building their section of Wall, many of them remained to operate it as the garrison, and to service those on duty with necessary supplies. It is quite likely that the way we’ve come up was a route established by women and children who carried food and water to the sentries, 400 years ago this very evening when the Wall was at the height of its operation in 1594. That’s … let me do the arithmetic to work out the ‘Ming’ date … from 1572 to 1594, making it the 23rd year of the Wanli Emperor’s reign.

We reached the base of the Wall. At 1.88 metres in