Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  In 1997, he entered Harvard Law School. It was a homecoming—he’d grown up in Lincoln, Massachusetts—but he missed Beijing and found himself searching for distractions. (“I split a lot of wood.”) During his first vacation, Spindler returned to China to hike. By then, he had the idea that in his spare time he could write a book about the Ming dynasty Great Wall, and he began reading histories. After graduation, he accepted a consulting job in the Beijing office of McKinsey & Company; every free weekend, he hiked or studied Ming texts. Finally, after a little more than a year at McKinsey, he quit in order to pursue his research full-time. His goals were ambitious: to hike every section of the Great Wall in the Beijing region and to read every word about the structure that was written during the Ming dynasty.

  Spindler had paid off his law-school loans, and he had sixty thousand dollars in savings. He expected that it would take him a year or two to complete his field work. He hiked to wall sections, took notes, and recorded details on a spreadsheet. Often he saw more wall in the distance, and he marked these sitings on another database, which identified future research trips. The to-do list seemed to get longer with every journey. In 1985, a Chinese satellite survey had identified three hundred and ninety miles of wall in the Beijing region, but Spindler found many additional sections that were not included in this total.

  He became a fixture in the National Library of China. He read from the Ming Veritable Records, a day-to-day history of the dynasty, and he tracked down the reports of various Ming officials. Occasionally he found a specialized work dedicated to wall defense. Some books could only be located elsewhere, so he spent weeks on the road. In a freezing library in Guangzhou, he read a detailed Ming guide to key wall fortifications; the book was so obscure that nobody had quoted it directly since 1707. He flew to Japan in order to read a rare Chinese history written by Su Zhigao, an official who served in the Ministry of Defense during the mid-sixteenth century. Spindler spent three weeks poring through the book in Japan, and during that time he ate dinner in a restaurant twice. The other nights he cooked pasta, cabbage, and tomato sauce, and poured yogurt on top. (“It’s cheaper than cheese.”) In Beijing, he rented a small apartment in a run-down building for $225 a month. He became familiar with the no-questions return policy of the Tilley hat. (“You have to pay for postage.”) At the Miyun bus station, which is close to many sections of the wall, the minivan drivers began greeting him by shouting, “Beidianzi, six yuan!” Beidianzi is a village, and six yuan is the deal Spindler struck after an epic bargaining session that has become a part of Miyun minivan lore.

  Over four years, he earned a total of $6,200 from the occasional consulting job or lecture. In 2003, he applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which occasionally funds projects by independent scholars. A panel of anonymous academics assessed the proposal, and they were withering. One wrote, “The applicant has no track record as an interpreter of the humanities.” Another remarked: “Likelihood of completion: Not clear.” The following year, with guidance from former classmates who had become professors, Spindler applied again. This time the evaluations were positive, at least in the terms of a jargon that is nearly as formalized as classical Chinese. (Panelist 1: “I feel that [the proposed book] would be a quality interpreter of the humanities.”) But the application was still rejected.

  In Beijing, Spindler dated a woman whom he had met when they were in law school together, and now she worked as an executive at Siemens. “She was very supportive,” Spindler told me. “I couldn’t have asked for anything more.” But he kept finding more Great Wall and more Ming texts; finally, in 2005, they parted ways. “It’s certainly one of the reasons we broke up,” he said. “She couldn’t see the end to it.”

  At the time of our first hike, Spindler had been researching for nine years, with the past four devoted entirely to the project. But he had yet to publish one word about the wall, and he had no formal contact with academia. He was extremely cautious, in part because he had grown accustomed to working in isolation. Nobody had ever combined field and textual research in this depth—it would have been impossible for any academic based in the United States or Europe—and his methodology had become as demanding and idiosyncratic as his hiking gear. In his mind, it was pointless to begin writing while his to-do spreadsheet still listed more than a hundred days of hiking.

  The numbers consumed him. During our trip to the Great Eastern Tower, he commented that it was the eightieth day he’d spent on the wall that year. Since 2005, he’s dated K. C. Swanson, an American freelance journalist who lives in Beijing. “David tends to remember days in relation to his wall hikes,” she told me. “One day he said, ‘This is our one-year anniversary.’ He kept talking—he shouldn’t have done that!—and he said we had started dating two days after a certain trip he took. It’s like primitive cultures where people date things by when the volcano erupted.”

  In 2006, Spindler began giving more lectures—his main client was Abercrombie & Kent, a high-end travel service—and his income rose to $29,000. He has no hobbies to speak of, and his bookshelf is devoted almost entirely to wall research. He owns five CDs. He’s surprisingly social—he’s always had many close friends in the city, both Chinese and foreign, and it’s common to see him out at parties in the city. But few people understand his obsession. “A couple of times I’ve tried to ask why it really gets him,” Swanson said. “David is a very rational person, and maybe it would be easily explained in an emotional way, but that’s not how David is. He’s an eminently rational person doing what is basically an irrational thing.”

  In October, I accompanied Spindler on his 331st journey into the field. By public bus and hired minivan, we traveled to a remote village called Shuitou. In 2003, while visiting the wall here, Spindler had seen some high ridges that he thought might contain more fortifications. In the village, he had also studied a Ming wall tablet that was now kept in a farmer’s home. In 2006, the Chinese government passed the first national law protecting the Great Wall, and Ming artifacts cannot be bought or sold, but the remoteness of many sections has made enforcement difficult.

  In Shuitou, we asked about the tablet, and a woman told us that the owner was out of town.

  “Do you want to buy it?” she asked.

  Spindler declined, and then told me, “They offered to sell it last time, too.”

  The harvest was nearly finished, and wind rustled stalks of corn that stood dead in the fields. Beyond the village, we climbed a steep section of wall, where thousands of Mongols had attacked in 1555. Spindler said that the typical Chinese defense relied on crude cannons, arrows, spears, and even rocks. “There were regulations about how many stones you were supposed to have, and how you were supposed to bring them to the second floor of the tower if there was an attack,” he said. Later, he pointed out a circle of loose stones that had been arranged carefully atop the wall. Four and a half centuries later, they were still waiting for the next attack.

  The Mongols liked to come at night. They traveled on horseback, usually in small groups. Near enemy territory, they followed ridgelines, because they feared ambushes. They were not occupiers. They penetrated Chinese lands, gathered booty, and returned home as quickly as possible. They liked to steal livestock, valuables, household goods, and Chinese people. They carried the Chinese men and women back to the steppes and allowed them to form families. Then they sent the men south to gather intelligence on Chinese defenses, using their wives and children as hostages.

  The most vivid accounts of the Mongols come from Chinese officers who served in the north. Su Zhigao, the author of the rare book that Spindler read in Japan, had particularly intimate contact with Mongols during the mid-1500s. (“They like to fornicate, paying little attention to whether it’s day or night or whether there’s anyone watching.”) Like most Ming writers, he calls them lu—barbarians. (“Every barbarian family brews alcohol and all of them like to drink; the barbarians drink like cattle, not even stopping to breathe in the process
.”) His account is a dark sort of anthropology, written in the hope that the reader will come to both know and hate the enemy. (“Barbarians like to spear babies for sport.”)

  In fact, they were sophisticated raiders, and warfare was complex. Both sides employed spies and spread false intelligence. Mongols signaled to each other with smoke; Chinese used blasts of gunpowder to communicate along the wall. Arthur Waldron identified three basic Ming strategies for dealing with the northerners. In the early Ming, the Chinese often took the offensive, pushing Mongol settlements away from the frontier. The second approach was buying off key Mongol leaders with gifts, official titles, or opportunities for trade. But some Ming emperors refused to negotiate with people they believed were savages. Their third option was building defensive walls—an ineffective tactic, in Waldron’s view, and one that he compares to the Maginot Line. Wall building became the trademark of the later Ming, he writes, because the dynasty had become too weak to fight and too proud to conduct diplomacy.

  Spindler believes that the late-Ming response was less rigid than that. In his reading, he has found that the Chinese tactics varied from place to place, depending upon local threats. And wall building was often coordinated with offensive and accommodationist strategies. In any case, he is convinced that no Chinese policy could completely resolve their problems with the Mongols, whose internal power struggles contributed to raiding. In Mongol culture, legitimate leadership was supposed to be confined to the direct heir of Genghis Khan, and to pass only to the firstborn son of each generation. Outside that narrow line, ambitious Mongols often found that the easiest opportunities to gain status lay to the south.

  One such contender was Altan Khan, who was the second son of a third son. Frustrated by his genealogical standing, he attempted to improve his lot by establishing trade relations with the Chinese in the 1540s. But the reigning Ming emperor, Jiajing, refused. On September 26, 1550, the night of the midautumn festival, Altan Khan led tens of thousands of Mongols on a surprise attack northeast of Beijing. They breached the crude stone wall there and pillaged for two weeks, killing and capturing thousands of Chinese. After that, the Ming began using mortar on a large scale to improve the fortifications.

  Meanwhile, the oldest son of Altan Khan, known to the Chinese as the Yellow Prince, tried a different strategy. He married dozens of women from important Mongol families as a means of solidifying alliances. But soon he began to have financial problems, which he solved in the simplest way possible: he sent the women back. The Ming had already been paying a regular quota of silver and goods to these women’s families, in order to keep peace in the north; but now the ex-wives began showing up at Chinese wall garrisons, demanding more support. In 1576, after one such appeal was rejected, a raiding party penetrated a gap in a remote part of the defense network. The region was so rugged that the Ming believed that no wall was necessary, but the Mongols got through, killing twenty-one Chinese. The Ming responded with another major wall-building campaign, this time using brick, which allowed construction on even the steepest terrain. Spindler calls the incident of 1576 “the raid of the scorned Mongol women”—a failed harem that helped inspire the stunning brick fortifications of Beijing.

  Historians generally portray the Great Wall as a military failure and a waste of resources. Spindler disagrees, noting that the improved wall held back major attacks in the sixteenth century. At Shuitou, where we hiked, the Chinese defeated thousands of Mongols in a key battle. For the Ming, the wall was only part of a complex foreign policy, but because it’s the most lasting physical relic, it receives disproportionate blame for their fall.

  “People say, was it worth it?” Spindler said. “But I don’t think that’s how they thought at the time. You don’t get a nation-state saying, ‘We’re going to give up this terrain’ or ‘We’re going to sacrifice x number of citizens and soldiers.’ That’s not a calculus they used. An empire is always going to try to protect itself.”

  In the afternoon, we bushwhacked. On his hikes, Spindler sometimes followed game trails, and often he walked atop wall sections, where the brush is less dense. But occasionally there was no option other than to pursue a ridge straight through the brambles. He called this “hiking like a Mongol,” and I hated it. I hated the thorns, and I hated the bad footing. I hated how my clothes got torn, and I hated the superiority of Spindler’s bizarre wall regalia. I hated how branches that were chest-high for him hit me in the face. Mostly, I hated the Mongols for hiking this way.

  When we reached the ruins of an old stone fort atop a ridge, it felt like emerging from a long swim underwater. To the east, the view opened for twenty miles. Only a single human settlement was visible—the village of Zhenbiancheng, still surrounded by the high stone walls of a Ming garrison. Looking down on the walled settlement, Spindler remarked that it had been a hardship post, where commanders had requested that soldiers be paid in grain rather than in silver. “There was bad inflation during the Ming,” he said. “It was connected to the discovery of silver in the New World.”

  The next morning, after camping for the night, we discovered faint traces of another stone fort with a sight line to the ridge. Spindler theorized that they had been used to send signals to Zhenbiancheng. He carefully recorded everything, and back in Beijing he would add these details to his computer database. He was skilled at deconstructing the wall—every time I hiked with him, he noticed obscure details that reflected some element of military strategy. But eventually he would have to create something out of all these facts. For years, he had searched them out atop high ridges and in forgotten books, and sometimes the details could be as distracting as a thorn in the face. “Because David is not ensconced in academia, he’s got a lot more freedom to develop his own line of inquiry,” his friend Andrew Field told me. But there was a risk to the isolation. “I’m trying to urge him to seek closure,” Field said. “But the way David’s mind works, he has an amazing ability for detail.”

  The bushwhacking was intensely time-consuming, and it could also be dangerous. During our hike above Zhenbiancheng, I asked Spindler if he’d ever had any accidents. He said that in 1998, a friend had fallen off a tower and broken his wrist. They worried about hiking further through rough terrain late in the day, so they spent the night on the wall. In retrospect, Spindler admitted that he’d been too cautious, and he wished they had descended immediately.

  “Was he in pain?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Spindler said softly. “He was in a lot of pain.”

  Spindler always told friends where he was hiking, and he almost never made overnight trips alone. His most frequent companion is Li Jian, a classmate from Peking University who now works in the rare-books division of the National Library. Her first expedition with Spindler, in 2000, was a three-day hike. “I had always had problems with insomnia,” she told me. “But when I got back from that hike I slept really well!” Since then, she has spent 185 days on the wall with Spindler.

  Over time, Li Jian acquired an L.L.Bean wool hunting shirt, a white Tilley hat, La Sportiva mountaineering boots, and elk-leather utility-line worker gloves from J. Edwards of Chicago. She cut off a pair of long underwear at the knee and scissored a round hole for her face. In the field, she’s a five-foot-two female Chinese double of Spindler, following him through the brush. She told me that she has never led.

  In June of 2003, they set off for a three-day hike in the wilds of Mentougou, in the western Beijing region. The mountains there are weirdly shaped; the high peaks are easy to negotiate, but the lower flanks deteriorate into unexpected cliffs. Hiking like a Mongol, Spindler got lost, and every attempt to go down ended at a sheer drop. Fortunately, it had rained, so they drank water that had settled in the hollows of rocks. Friends organized a search party and drove out from Beijing. Five days after Spindler and Li Jian had set off, they finally found a trail and made it back, meeting the search party en route. Today, Li Jian continues to hike the wall as therapy for insomnia.

  Chinese universities may not
have produced Great Wall specialists, but a small community of wall enthusiasts has developed outside of academia. They tend to be athletic—a rare quality among the Chinese intelligentsia, whose disdain for labor has sometimes been a problem in archaeology. And the Great Wall attracts obsessives. Dong Yaohui, a former utility-line worker, left his job in 1984 and doggedly followed wall sections on foot for thousands of miles across China. After writing a book about the experience, he helped found the Great Wall Society of China, which publishes two journals and advocates preservation of the ruins. Cheng Dalin, the retired Xinhua photographer, graduated from a sports academy. William Lindesay, a British geologist and marathoner, came to China in 1987 and ran and hiked more than 2,470 miles along the wall. He settled in Beijing, published four wall-related books, and founded International Friends of the Great Wall, a small organization that also focuses on conservation.

  The most active Great Wall researcher at Peking University is a policeman named Hong Feng. As a child, he enrolled in a sports school—he became a sprinter and a long jumper—but he always enjoyed reading history. After barely missing the cutoff for admission to college, he entered the police academy, and was eventually assigned to the city’s unit at Peking University. In the mid-1990s, he began hiking recreationally and was disappointed with contemporary books about the wall. “They make too many mistakes,” he told me. “So I started reading the original texts.”

  I met Hong Feng in the Peking University police station, where he was working a twenty-four-hour shift. He is the station’s supervisor, and uses his days off for hiking trips. At forty-five, Hong is tall and strong, although he suffers from a chronically sore right elbow, which was injured when he fell while researching. He often visits the university library, but he has never discussed his research with professors. “Scholars in the archaeology and history departments just aren’t interested in the Great Wall,” he said.