Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  Whether on the road to the Great Wall, beside it or even through it, cars have caused it widespread damage. To accommodate peak numbers of cars on holidays, the development corporation at Badaling used land directly beside the ancient structure to build the largest car parks next to the Wall. The proximity of these seas of vehicles leaves another intrusive scar on the Great Wall landscape.

  One year after Prince Borghese’s achievement, Ford began mass production of its Model T, and man’s twentieth-century love affair with the motorcar began. The Beijing–Paris event was revived in 1997; at the time of writing, the next event is planned for 2016.

  45.

  A Milestone Journey

  The Great Wall of China by William Edgar Geil

  ‘There is a Great Wall of China. So much the geographies tell everybody; but they do not make it clear whether it is built of china, or why it is, or how long it is, or how long it has been.’ So read the opening lines of the first book – in any language, anywhere – with the title The Great Wall of China.

  With pertinent and witty questions, some with double meanings, William Geil summarised the outstanding mysteries of a structure made semi-legendary by maps, and announced his intention to go out and find the answers. It was 1908, and while the Chinese Wall was considered to be the largest edifice ever raised by human endeavour, its purported magnitude was counterbalanced by a void in knowledge that was beginning to engage the curiosity of daring human minds. The previous year, the British archaeologist Aurel Stein (1862–1943) had explored remnants of the Han Wall (see Object 14). But the Great Wall, as we see and know it today, being the Ming Wall whose remains were marked on contemporary maps, was the world’s most famous building and yet the least known. It still lay waiting to be discovered in total.

  The author didn’t come from where one might first expect: a Wall-side town such as Jiayuguan or Shanhaiguan, or an ancient centre of Chinese learning such as Xi’an, Luoyang or Hangzhou. No, he set out to become the first explorer of the Wall from end to end by taking a railroad across America, from Doylestown to Philadelphia to San Francisco. He then boarded a steamer across the Pacific, via Hawaii and Yokohama, disembarking at Taku, near today’s Tianjin – an odyssey of thirty-nine days – before he reached China’s distant shores and the Old Dragon’s Head, the seaside terminus of the Ming Wall.

  DESCRIPTION: The Great Wall of China, illustrated book by Dr William Edgar Geil

  SIGNIFICANCE: The first book about the Great Wall in any language; contains field observations, history, legends, myths and photographs obtained during the author’s milestone journey between Shanhaiguan and Jiayuguan in 1908

  ORIGIN: Published simultaneously by Sturgis & Walton, New York, and John Murray, London, November 1909

  LOCATION: Author’s collection, Beijing

  For generations, the Chinese had built the Wall, manned it, quarried it away and lived beside it. They made it, used it and then abused it. It was in their past and their present, and they assumed it would always be there. Its name – Wanli Changcheng – told them its length. They thought they knew it because it was there and theirs. It wasn’t special because it was common. Familiarity led to oversight, even contempt.

  Merely reading its evocative name, seeing it from afar, a barrier so long, so continuous, was enough to convince Geil of its greatness, that it was worthy of exploration from one end to the other. What a structure to be marked on a map! What a magical name! Earlier, Geil had noted ‘how the West knew Greece and Rome well enough, and now was the time to go East, to China for a change’. His first odyssey there had been down the ‘Long River’ – the Changjiang, or Yangzi – in 1904, and in 1908 he returned to experience the Long Wall.

  During the last few days of May 1908, a ‘local’ fixer, Luther Newton-Hayes, an ‘old China hand’ born in Suzhou to American missionary parents, sought men and mules for Geil’s expedition at Shanhaiguan’s ‘West Side’ market, a rigmarole described in the first of Geil’s typewritten sheets headed ‘The Great Wall Letters’. This was one of several documentation methods that he employed, along with hastily scrawled (and very amusing) diary notes, and comprehensive photography that would show, for the first time, the Great Wall’s varied architectural elements and its diverse host landscapes.

  Geil’s hand scrawls were brief, often made on the go – perhaps akin to today’s Tweets. ‘From the saddle I can count 32 watchtowers’ (Funing County, Hebei). ‘Must send a photograph to this very hospitable gentleman – Mr. Zhou Chongwen, Zhuangdaokou Village, Huairou County, Beijing’ (the Zhous are still there). Another mentions staying in the ‘Lin’ family village, whose surname Geil directly translated as ‘Woods’; then the village was Chi’ligou, now it’s called Xizhazi Yidui, and the Lins are still there, too. Further west, Geil tells us how he observed a true ‘Sunday’: sitting in the cool, shady chambers of a derelict Shaanbei watchtower, to avoid travelling on the Sabbath and under a blistering July sun.

  Geil was a man of contrasting characteristics: Baptist missionary, gutsy explorer and inquisitive scholar. Standing a lofty 1.93 metres in height, he planted himself on the ground with size fourteen boots. He wore a dark suit and cleric’s collar in Doylestown, but added a Stetson, a cloak and a Colt revolver along the Wall. He rode horses in China, while he drove a Model-T Ford in Doylestown and Philly.

  His writing was also high-tech, when he had the time. He describes building a makeshift table of blue-grey Wall bricks below the Horizontal Ridge Pass (Huairou’s Xidachang), so he could type out one of his ‘Great Wall Letters’. His Blickensderfer No. 6 portable typewriter and carbon paper attracted audiences en route as he ‘blogged’ his progress, sending letters by mail when the opportunity arose; thankfully, he kept reference copies. He summarised his route by listing the places he passed through, recording their names in both handwritten Chinese characters and typed transliterations. He also noted the distances in li between them, as well as the dates he arrived and departed.

  Eighty-one days after leaving the stele overlooking the Yellow Sea which bears characters that translate as ‘Heaven Made the Seas and Mountains’, Geil passed through the portals of the Jiayuguan Fortress, taking a photograph of the ‘opposite’ stele, inscribed ‘The Martial Barrier Under Heaven’. It was 21 August 1908, and mandarins of the Yamen held a celebratory banquet in his honour. With amusement, Geil recorded the nineteen dishes they served, which included sea cucumber despite their distance from the ocean. He made no mention of any sentiments expressed by his hosts over his accomplishment. It appears the mandarins honoured him as a foreigner who had come from afar, from Meiguo, ‘the Beautiful Country’, not for how or why he had come.

  The next morning Geil and company rode horses to ‘the real end of the Wall’, following the rammed-earth Wall through a line of several watchtowers and collecting a brick from one of the encased towers en route. Seven li from the fortress stood the very last watchtower, a cliff-edge perch above the Qilian Gorge. Here, it was calculated, the Shanhaiguan stele stood a distance of 1145 miles, as the crow flew, from the Jiayuguan stele, while the actual length of the ‘Great Barrier’ between the two stones twisted and turned along loops and spurs for 2550 miles.

  Standing against the last tower, Geil posed for a photograph, his American flag unfurled and with his brick in his hands. After the photo he ceremoniously dropped it into the river below. It was not an issue of weight but of conservation. As a memento he collected a maroon and white stone for a paperweight.

  This was not the end of Geil’s journey, but merely a turning point. He returned to the fortress and then headed back east, along the Hexi Corridor. One of his most profound diary entries reads: ‘No end to the G.W. No end to it in the East, or the West. The name is not correct which says 10,000 li . . . it has no end.’

  His outbound journey had been through the inferno of northern China’s summer, and on his return leg he travelled through chilly autumn and brutal winter conditions, bringing him down with pneumonia. He followed strands of t
he Great Wall in Qinghai, along the ‘Lanzhou loop’ in south-east Gansu and up the inside line into Hebei’s Laiyuan. The final weeks of his journey were through a chaotic Empire that was mourning the death of the Guangxu Emperor and the Dowager Empress Cixi.

  In April 1909, one year after leaving Doylestown, Geil arrived back in the United States, with his photographs, papers and paperweight packed in cases. He was whisked to the White House in Washington D.C., where he briefed President William H. Taft on his discoveries. By November he had published his book.

  Some of the objects in this series are from my own collection, and from that group it’s William Geil’s book that I treasure the most. An inscription I made on its inside board explains what Geil’s legacy meant to me:

  Presented to me in 1991 by Mrs Marjorie Hessel-Tiltman, this book inspired a second exploration of the Great Wall for both William Geil and I, best described as ‘The Wall of Two Williams’. I used Dr Geil’s photographs herein to see and show how the same locations looked almost one century later. This work resulted in the publication of a ‘joint work’, entitled ‘The Great Wall Revisited’, which I dedicated to William Geil as the First Explorer of the Great Wall. This too is the book that was exhibited at the national exhibition ‘The Great Wall Revisited’, staged at the Capital Museum, Beijing in 2007 and the Imperial Academy, Beijing in 2008. That year, 2008, marked the centenary of Dr Geil’s historic journey, an event I commemorated by travelling to his hometown of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. I carried this book on that occasion, quoted from it and rested it – momentarily – on his grave.

  ‘Our’ work together in the decade up to 2008 elevated William Geil’s profile from unknown foreigner to an intimate Lao Weilian or ‘Old William’. He is widely recognised in China now as being the first Great Wall explorer, and the first to write a book on the subject. My rephotography of his 1908 Wall views, which reveal a century of change, have influenced a better future for the monument and helped stir a desire in China to make the next century a better one for the Wall. Geil’s photographs proved that the universal Chinese assumption that the Wall would always be there was quite wrong. His photos showed a Wall that, in mine, is often no longer there.

  In the United States, however, Geil made the opposite journey, from fame to oblivion. He died of pneumonia in Venice in 1925, whereupon his bereaved wife, Constance, locked up his study, including his expedition records and belongings. Decades passed and his Wall achievement was forgotten. His body, transported back to Doylestown, was laid to rest in the family plot, which is marked by a large granite cube standing proudly in the town’s cemetery.

  In June 2008 I visited him there. His headstone inscription recorded his life in name and dates:

  William Edgar Geil

  Oct. 1, 1865–Apr. 11, 1925

  To honour the man who showed us what the Great Wall looked like in the past, when it was a little greater, I had commissioned the design of a bronze plaque on behalf of the International Friends of the Great Wall. On it was a map of China marked with the Great Wall, and I placed it beside his headstone during a ceremony on 16 June 2008.

  On Geil’s grave I rested my copy of his book, which had inspired a second Great Wall journey for us both. It was a collaboration that also led to a Chinese translation, which has guided many others since to follow in our footsteps.

  I took off my cap to him and said: ‘William Geil, you were the first man to travel all along the Great Wall, turning over a new page in its long history. Study and appreciation of the Great Wall began with your journey, book and photographs, and your complete panorama of the Great Wall, which have taught us a great deal. You are the first international friend of the Great Wall.’

  46.

  Building Fiction

  Kafka’s Great Wall short story

  Author Franz Kafka (1883–1924) never saw the Great Wall; he never even visited China. It was said that he only once set foot outside his native city, Prague, travelling to Berlin to live with a woman. But in his imagination he ventured to a place at the Great Wall where no one had been for more than 300 years. Yet it was a place seen in the present tense: a construction site at the building of the Great Wall.

  Kafka was lured to the Great Wall as a setting for his story because of its relentless consumption of time and the repetitive work endured by the builders, which allowed him to explore the psychological toll it took on them. He probed the Wall’s alter ego in this way by writing Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (‘At the Building of the Great Wall’).

  It’s literature, not history – a story, not a source. It’s plain, not eloquent. It’s dreary, bewildering and disillusioning, not uplifting. Fiction, not fact. Kafka wrote it for himself, not for us. During his life, he burned ninety per cent of his manuscripts, and relatively few existed unpublished when he died in 1929. His last instruction to Max Brod – a fellow Czech, a fellow Jew, and a lifelong friend, writer and confidant – was to burn all his remaining papers unread. Brod couldn’t, and didn’t. Had he complied, he would have destroyed a rare piece of the Great Wall’s story, among other works.

  Brod’s defiant act of preservation makes Kafka’s Great Wall reachable today, and all the more important. It prompts us to think outside the box for a change – to consider the Wall in a different light, not as a spot-lit wonder but as an absurdity.

  The Wall had been dubbed the world’s longest cemetery, and clearly had drained the labours of untold millions. Legend had it that men were torn away from their families and worked to death at the Wall, their corpses becoming its fill. Writers of limited imaginations might have written of the physical brutality of the enslaved, of gulag conditions on the frontier, but that was too straightforward and simple for Franz Kafka.

  The English writer Somerset Maugham was one of the first to touch on the Wall’s double-sided character, publishing a postcard-length piece in 1923 which began and concluded with the same line: ‘There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible stood the Great Wall of China.’ Several years earlier, Kafka had already started focusing on the subtler conflict between the controllers and the controlled, the ‘Builders’ and the ‘builders’, showing their adeptness, shrewd politics and propaganda on the one hand, and their obedience, confusion, frustration, scepticism and mental anguish on the other.

  Kafka’s dominant motif is the Great Wall’s absurdity in the eyes of his narrator, perhaps a middle-ranking builder. He’s far from his home and, as he’s a southerner, the Wall seems irrelevant to him; he even doubts the piecemeal fashion in which it is being erected. He is dubious about its purpose but feels trapped between his need to do a good job and his sympathies for his subordinates, who simply work for their pay, always moving towards an unreachable finishing line. He says that the Wall is planned to be so long that it can never be completed, not even if one lived for 500 years.

  As I read ‘At the Building of the Great Wall’ (Kafka’s title is often translated simply as ‘The Great Wall of China’), I hear a strange echo. What I saw just yesterday, last week, last month, last year, in hundreds of locations for the last fifteen years comes to mind. During this time, the city of Beijing, my adopted home, has become a patchwork of countless construction sites, with a sky full of cranes. But under this mechanical-age exterior I have observed the down-to-earth efforts of masses of workers – largely manual labourers – as they moved mounds of materials, churned up dust and made incessant noise. Each observation can be captioned with a line from Kafka: ‘months or even years laying stone upon stone’ and ‘hundreds of miles from their homes’.

  The anonymity, scale and conformity of what I have seen makes everything seem more ‘Kafkaesque’. The workers are dwarfed by what they’re making. Resembling red ants or yellow insects – depending on which hardhats are worn at the site – armies of men create order from chaos. They speak southern dialects and have distant homes, so they have few diversions or downtime, which makes for fast progress. They’ve built skyscrapers, housing complexes, ring roads, expre
ssways, stadiums, stations, airport terminals and office blocks. They’ve changed Beijing, tripling its size, transforming its skylines, making the star on the map (which is always used on Chinese maps to mark the capital) an exploding one.

  These modern China scenes can be plausibly transposed across the centuries back to Ming China, the time of Kafka’s story. Temporal and spatial divides, factual evidence and fictional views blur easily. I had a notion that Kafka’s fiction was partly fact, and that some of the Great Wall facts that we have come to trust might just be fictional. The parallels between Kafka and now were quite extraordinary; they no longer appeared to be comparisons between past and present, but were more like recurring cycles, history repeating itself. Both building sites were of unprecedented scale, and both featured the enormous consumption of raw materials and migrations of workers; in each case the aim was not just to erect buildings, but to engage in a nation-building project that united the people in one cause.

  DESCRIPTION: Beim Bauder Chinesischen Mauer ('At the Building of the Great Wall'), short story by Franz Kafka

  SIGNIFICANCE: Fictional insight into the thoughts of the Great Wall’s builders

  ORIGIN: Written in 1917, published posthumously in 1931

  LOCATION: Author’s collection, Beijing; the manuscript is held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS Kafka 21, 3v 4r,)

  During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Beijing generated more new construction each year than the whole of the European Union’s twenty-something states. Four and a half centuries previously, the Yan Shan, the mountain range to Beijing’s immediate north, had been the lynchpin in a chain of the largest, most sustained, material-consuming and labour-intensive construction drive in history.