A journey along China's Great Wall

It is the emblem of the People’s Republic: China’s Great Wall. Correspondent Stephan Scheuer takes you to the area near the village of Yunling, on a tour of the older sections of this extraordinary structure.

Background

The Great Wall stretches more than 21,000 kilometres across the north of China – from Bohai Bay in the east to the Gobi Desert in the west. Only a small portion has been restored and developed for tourism; the great majority is crumbling or overgrown with scrub. Most visitors see only Badaling or Mutianyu – the two sections near Beijing that have been developed as tourist destinations since the 1950s.

This report leads to lesser-known sections away from those mass-market sites. Areas such as Jinshanling, Simatai or the “Wild Wall” near Jiankou show the Wall in its original condition: crumbling bricks, sunken watchtowers, stones that have outlasted whole generations. For many visitors it is precisely these unrestored stretches that offer the more powerful experience.

The Wall was never a single continuous structure but a network of fortifications built by different dynasties over two millennia. Most of what we see today dates from the Ming period (1368 to 1644) – built to protect the Chinese heartlands against the Mongols to the north. Ironically the Mongol successors, the Manchu, later bypassed the Wall simply because a Chinese general opened the decisive passage to them.

Since 1987 the Wall has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In recent years Beijing has intensified restoration work and attempted to manage tourism – also with the aim of further establishing the Wall internationally as a cultural showpiece. At the same time, a large part of the structure remains unprotected. Local farmers used historic wall bricks as building material for decades; erosion and unauthorised interventions continue to destroy sections that would be invaluable to historical understanding.