I’m not an expert on walls, nor am I an expert on defending your empire from invading northern barbarians (the reason it was built, but it didn‘t perform that task very well, more due to sentries being susceptible to bribery than with any functional fault). But seeing the wall today, roughly two thousand years after it was originally built, left me in awe of the capabilities of the Qin and subsequent Chinese dynasties that oversaw it‘s construction.
It’s not just the height and girth that are impressive, it’s the terrain that the wall runs through - it’s far from being flat. Parts of the wall we walked on were even quite tough physically, due to the steep inclines in parts. The manpower and engineering skill and logistics would make the wall a challenge to build today - 2000 years ago it was something that only a hugely powerful empire with available slave labour could even dream of building.
We were able to hike up and down the wall for a couple of hours. As I mentioned above, walking on the wall can be physically tough, which inevitably meant that John soon took off on his own blistering pace to see as much as possible, whilst Gearoid and I took a more leisurely pace. Watchtowers punctuated our walk - these were once used to look out for invading barbarian hordes, but are now used by male Chinese tourists to piss under (unfortunately this isn’t the first case of the Chinese pissing on their own cultural heritage).
And so back to Beijing we returned, glad to have gotten the must-see off the list. At times sightseeing can seem like work, but the wall is an amazing sight, so this time it certainly didn’t feel like that.
