That was hutong karma—sites passed through countless incarnations, and always the mighty were laid low. A couple of blocks away, the family home of Wan Rong, empress to the last monarch of the Qing dynasty, had been converted into a diabetes clinic. In Ju’er, the beautiful Western-style mansion of Rong Lu, a powerful Qing military official, had served one incarnation as the Afghanistan embassy before becoming what it is today: the Children’s Fun Publishing Co., Ltd. A huge portrait of Mickey Mouse hangs above the door.
Good Old Wang passed the Olympic toilet (“it’s a lot less cluttered than when I was here”), and then we came to the nondescript three-story building where he had lived since 1969. It wasn’t a historic structure, which was why it had been approved for demolition. The electricity and the heat had been cut off; we walked upstairs into an abandoned hallway. “This was my room when I was first married,” he said, stopping at a door. “Nineteen eighty-seven.”
His brother had lost his arm that year. We continued down the hall, to the apartment where Wang had lived most recently, with his wife, his daughter, his father, and his brother. The girl’s drawings still decorated the walls: a sketch of a horse, the English phrase “Merry Christmas.” “This is where the TV was,” he said. “That’s where my father slept. My brother slept there.”
The family had since dispersed. The father and brother now live in a hutong to the north; Good Old Wang, his wife, and their daughter are using the home of a relative who is out of town. As compensation for the condemned apartment, Good Old Wang was given a small section of a decrepit building near the Drum Tower. He hoped to fix it up in the spring.
Outside, I asked him if it had been hard to leave the hutong after nearly half a century. He thought for a moment. “You know, lots of things happened while I lived here,” he said. “And maybe there were more sad events than happy events.”
We headed west out of the hutong. On the way, we passed an ad for the Beijing Great Millennium Trading Co., Ltd. Later that day, returning home, I saw a line of pedicabs: Chinese tourists, bundled against the cold, cameras in hand as they cruised the ancient street.
Walking the Wall
When the weather is good, or when i’m tired of having seven million neighbors, I drive north from downtown Beijing. It takes an hour and a half to reach Sancha, a quiet village where I rent a farmhouse. The road switchbacks up a steep hillside and dead-ends at the village, but a footpath continues into the mountains. The trail forks twice, climbs for a steep mile through a forest of walnut and oak, and finally terminates at the Great Wall of China.
Once, I packed a tent and sleeping bag, hiked up from the village, and walked eastward along the wall for two days without seeing another person. Tourists rarely visit this area, where the wall is perched high on a ridgeline, magnificent in its isolation. The structure is made of brick and mortar; there are crenellations, and archer slits, and guard towers that rise more than twenty feet high. The tallest one is known locally as the Great Eastern Tower, and it looms above a stretch of wall that contains an inscribed marble tablet. Originally, there were many such tablets, but this is one of fewer than ten that are known to remain on the wall in the Beijing region. The inscription notes that in 1615 A.D. a crew of 2,400 soldiers built a section of the wall that measured exactly fifty-eight zhang and five cun. There are one hundred cun in a zhang, and each cun is about an inch and a half; the total length of this wall section is around six hundred and fifty feet. The bureaucratic precision of the inscription, in this forgotten place, seems as lonely as words can be.
In November, I hiked to the Great Eastern Tower with two friends who were visiting from New York. After reaching the tower, we began the long descent to the south. This stretch can be treacherous; many brick ramparts have collapsed. I was picking my way downhill when something in the rubble caught my eye. It was white—too white to be brick, too big to be mortar. I dug it out and saw four neat rows of carved characters.
It was a fragment of another marble tablet. I could make out a few words: something was six chi high, something else was two zhang. But the writing was in classical Chinese, which I’ve never studied, and the surface was badly scarred.
“How long do you think it’s been buried here?” one of my friends asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “But I think we better hide it.”
We covered the fragment with loose bricks. I memorized the surrounding details, so I could find it again. A month later I returned with David Spindler.
David Spindler stands six feet seven, and he is reserved in a way that is characteristic of many men who are very tall and thin. He once remarked to me that height is the only physical trait that Americans comment on openly, making offhand remarks and jokes that can be rude. After that, I started noticing that whenever I saw Spindler at social gatherings, he had usually found a way to sit down. Beijing is full of foreigners who cultivate an air of eccentricity, but everything about Spindler seems designed to avoid attention. He rarely talks in detail about his research, and he doesn’t promote himself as an expert. He chooses his words very carefully. He is thirty-nine years old, with short sandy hair, a long face, and gentle eyes. For people who know him casually in the city, the way I did for years, it’s a surprise to witness the transformation that occurs when he visits the mountains.
On a cold December morning, Spindler and I drove to Sancha and set off on foot to find the marble tablet. He wore a red-checked wool hunting shirt, a floppy white Tilley safari hat, and high-end La Sportiva mountaineering boots. For a face mask, he’d cut a leg off a pair of sweatpants, scissored a round hole, and pulled it over his head. His polyurethane-coated L.L.Bean hunting trousers had been reinforced by a local street tailor—cheap denim patches covered the expensive pants, like a friendship quilt linking Freeport and Beijing. His hands were protected by huge elk-leather gloves designed for utility line workers by J. Edwards of Chicago. Spindler looked like a scarecrow of specialty gear—some limbs equipped for hard labor, others for intense recreation. Over the years, he had determined that this was precisely the right ensemble for the Great Wall, where thorns and branches are common.
We followed the wall east. Every hundred yards or so, it connected to a tower. These structures were crumbling but still impressive, with high vaulted ceilings and arched windows. Periodically, Spindler pointed out details: a place where a door used to be barred, a brick frame that had once contained an inscribed tablet.
“The towers and the wall were totally different projects,” he said. “First, you had the brick towers, and the wall was just local stone. And then they came and improved the wall. That’s why these towers look a little funny.”
He pointed out a place where the wall’s crenellation ran right into the open window of a tower—the kind of thing that happens when you use two different contractors. Near the Great Eastern Tower, one section of wall had collapsed entirely. Spindler believed that the construction project of 1615 had ended right there, at the edge of a short precipice. He had measured it once, using the details found on the marble tablet near the tower. “These guys really hosed the next construction crew,” he said, gazing down at the precipice. “What could they do? It’s really hard to build from that point.”
I had hiked this section perhaps fifty times, but I had never noticed these details of construction. In my mind, it was simply the Great Wall—complete and virtually timeless. For Spindler, though, it was a work of many pieces and seasons. Construction generally took place in the spring, when the weather was good but Mongol raiders weren’t active. “Energy in the Mongol world was fat on the horses,” he said. “They didn’t have that after the winter, so the spring was not a good season for raiding. Summer was too hot. They didn’t like the heat; they didn’t like the insects. The Mongol bowstrings were made of hide, and with the humidity they supposedly went slack—this is described in Ming texts. Most raids took place in the fall.”
We came to the place where I had hidden the broken tablet. Spindler crouched in the cold
, running a finger along the carved characters. He recognized it immediately as a piece of a tablet that dated to 1614. The county antiquities bureau had recorded its inscription in 1988, but they had failed to track down its original location on the wall, and since then it had disappeared. Some looter had probably broken it.
“It’s saying the height of the wall, including the crenellations,” Spindler explained. “And then it starts in with all the names of the officials. God, it’s good that somebody got this down before it was destroyed.”
He pulled a tape measure out of his backpack. After examining the space between the carved lines, he quickly calculated the original dimensions. Slowly, he walked back along the wall, looking for a place where it could have been mounted. He found an empty brick-bordered ledge and measured it: perfect fit. For this small section of the wall, he now knew the basic story of two construction campaigns in the 1610s. Before leaving, we returned the fragment to the spot where I had found it, covering the marble with broken bricks.
While we were there, a local farmer hiked up from the south. He was trapping game: a dozen wire snares were looped over his shoulder. If the presence of a six-foot-seven foreigner in a Tilley hat and utility-line elk-leather gauntlets surprised the farmer, he didn’t show it. He asked if we had extra water, and Spindler gave him a bottle. During the following year, Spindler and I hiked through a number of villages together, and each time the locals hardly seemed to distinguish between the two of us. Andrew Field, a friend of Spindler’s who teaches Chinese history at the University of New South Wales, once told me that an unusually tall person might actually feel more comfortable on the Great Wall than in America. “In China, sure, he’s a monster,” Field said. “But aren’t we all?”
The first known historical reference to what we think of as the Great Wall dates to 656 B.C., during the Warring States period, when the kingdom of Chu constructed defensive barriers of packed earth. More than four centuries later, the state of Qin conquered all of its rivals, consolidating power across the north of what is now China. In 221 B.C., Qin Shihuang became the first man to declare himself emperor. After seizing power, he commanded the construction of roughly three thousand miles of changcheng.
The term translates literally as either “long wall” or “long walls”—Chinese doesn’t differentiate between singular and plural—and Qin’s barriers, like those of the Chu, consisted of hard-packed earth. Over the centuries, many dynasties faced the same basic problem: the wide-open frontier of the northern plains made the empire vulnerable to the nomadic Mongol and Turkic tribes that inhabited these lands. At times, the nomadic threat became more intense, and different dynasties responded with different strategies. The Tang, who ruled from 618 to 907 A.D., built virtually no walls, because the imperial family was part Turkic and skilled in Central Asian warfare and diplomacy. Even when dynasties constructed walls, they didn’t necessarily call them changcheng—over the centuries, more than ten terms were used to describe the fortifications.
The Ming usually called theirs bianqiang—“border wall(s)”—and they became the greatest wall builders in Chinese history. They came to power in 1368, after the collapse of the Yuan, a short-lived Mongol dynasty that had been founded by Kublai Khan. Even after the Mongols lost power in China, they continued to pose a threat in the north, and in the 1500s the Ming began to construct large fortifications of quarried stone and brick in the Beijing region. These are the iconic structures (some of them rebuilt and restored) that seem to continue endlessly in tourist photographs. The Ming was the only dynasty to build extensively with such durable materials, and many sections of wall ran for miles. But the bianqiang was a network rather than a single structure, and some regions had as many as four distinct lines of fortifications.
In 1644, domestic rebels stormed the capital, and the Ming emperor committed suicide. In desperation, a military commander in the northeast opened a major bianqiang gate to the Manchus, a northern tribe, in the hope that they would restore the ruling family. Instead, the Manchus founded their own dynasty, the Qing, which lasted until 1912. The Qing had little use for the walls—after all, these were people who had originally come from the far side of the barriers—and they abandoned the defensive system to the elements.
But as Western explorers and missionaries began to penetrate China in the eighteenth century, they toured the Ming ruins and confused them with stories they had been told about Qin Shihuang’s three-thousand-mile wall. Foreigners assumed that the Beijing region’s trellised brick fortifications were part of an unbroken line that had stretched across the north for two thousand years. In 1793, an Englishman named Sir John Barrow, who later founded the Royal Geographic Society of London, saw a section of wall near Beijing and, extrapolating from its measurements, declared that the entire structure must have contained enough stone to build two smaller walls around the equator. (Westerners rarely visited China’s west, where most walls were made of tamped earth.) At that time, foreigners usually called it “the Chinese wall,” but by the end of the nineteenth century, as the exaggerations accumulated, it had become the Great Wall of China. In February of 1923, a National Geographic article began, “According to astronomers, the only work of man’s hands which would be visible to the human eye from the moon is the Great Wall of China.” (It wasn’t visible from the moon in 1923, and it still isn’t.)
Eventually, the misconceptions made their way back to China. Under threat of foreign domination, leaders like Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong realized the propaganda value of a unified barrier. Changcheng became the equivalent of “the Great Wall,” a term that encompassed all northern fortifications, regardless of location or dynastic origin. The word described what was essentially an imaginary structure—a single, millennia-old wall.
Today, the concept of the Great Wall is so broad that it resists formal definition. When I met with scholars and preservationists in Beijing, I asked how changcheng should be defined, and I never heard the same thing twice. Some said that in order for a structure to qualify as part of the Great Wall it had to be at least a hundred kilometers long; others believed that any border fortification should be included. Some emphasized that it had to have been built by ethnic Chinese; others included walls built by non-Chinese tribes. Nobody could give an accurate length estimate, because there has never been a systematic survey. In 2006, various articles in China Daily described the length of the Great Wall as thirty-nine hundred miles, forty-five hundred miles, and thirty-one thousand miles.
There isn’t a scholar at any university in the world who specializes in the Great Wall. In China, historians typically focus on political institutions, while archaeologists excavate tombs. The Great Wall fits into neither tradition, and even within a more discretely defined topic—say, the Ming wall—there’s very little scholarship. The fortifications have been poorly preserved, and in the past many sections of low-lying wall were plundered for building materials, especially during the Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s, a Harvard PhD student named Arthur Waldron became interested in the relationship between Chinese and nomadic groups. “So I went to the library and thought I would find a big book in Chinese or maybe Japanese that would have everything about the Great Wall,” he told me recently. “But I didn’t. I thought that was strange. I began to compile a bibliography, and after a while I said, ‘This does not add up to the image that we have.’”
In 1990, Waldron published The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. Drawing on Ming texts—he didn’t conduct significant field research—Waldron described key aspects of wall building during that dynasty. He also identified many modern misconceptions about the wall, including the notion that it’s a single structure. It was a breakthrough book, and one that should have provided a foundation for further scholarship. But since then there hasn’t been another work of significant new archaeological or historical research, apart from one Chinese book by a surveying team that describes a six-hundred-mile series of Ming fortifications in the east. (Another book, published in 2006
, The Great Wall of China: China Against the World, 1000 B.C.–A.D. 2000, by Julia Lovell, a fellow at Cambridge, is primarily concerned with exploring the wall as a symbol for the Chinese worldview. She draws a parallel, for example, between the ancient wall and the current government’s Internet firewalls.)
In China, one of the best-known experts, Cheng Dalin, is not an academic but a retired photographer. For more than twenty years, Cheng specialized in taking pictures of the wall for the Xinhua News Service. In his spare time, he studied history, and he has published eight books, combining photographs and research. “The Great Wall touches on so many subjects—politics, military affairs, architecture, archaeology, history,” he told me. “Within each specialty, it’s too small. And taken as a whole it’s too big. You have to find little bits in so many different books; it’s not concentrated in one place. And nobody will pay you! How will you eat? How can a person spend ten years reading all these books?”
David Spindler first started hiking the Great Wall in 1994, when he was the only American studying for a master’s degree in history at Peking University. He had always been athletic—at Dartmouth, he’d rowed varsity crew and was on the cross-country ski team—and he saw hiking as the perfect break from city life. At Peking University, he wrote a master’s thesis in Chinese about Dong Zhongshu, a philosopher in the Western Han dynasty, in the second century B.C. After receiving his degree, Spindler decided against pursuing a career in academia. For a spell, he worked as an assistant in CNN’s Beijing bureau, and then he became a China market analyst for Turner Broadcasting. But neither journalism nor business felt right, and the only constant in those years was hiking the Great Wall.
Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.) Page 4
