From West to East on The Great Wall

  Shanhaiguan, China
Friday, November 24, 2006

Back in August, hundreds of miles and several temperature zones away we saw the Great Wall of China. That was the most Westerly edge of it - the unreconstructed, little visited, straw built part in the Gobi desert. This time we decided we wanted to see the most Easterly end. Instead of being eaten by sand, this part of the reconstructed brick-built wall is buffeted by the Yellow Sea.

03 Great Wall

Being the stubborn travellers we are, we shunned the easy to get to Great Wall day trip organised by our hostel and determined to go it alone. So we found ourselves travelling nearly eight hours in total by train from Beijing out to a far-flung coastal town called Shanhaiguan and back again.

10 On the Great Wall

It was quite an effort, but we're so glad we could be bothered. Instead of fighting our way through crowds of tourists and souvenir sellers we had the place to ourselves, apart from a handful of Chinese day trippers in the town.

01 The Great Wall reaches the sea

We picked up a really helpful taxi driver at the station who drove us out to a stretch of rebuilt wall which snakes into the mountains. You can clearly see where the unreconstructed part of the structure begins (just beyond the cable car and where the "Do not proceed any further" signs start!). We spent an hour climbing up the steep ramparts and surveying the beacon towers and surrounding landscape, before the cold wind made us beat a retreat to the coast.

11 View from the last tower on the Great Wall

The very end of the wall is known as the Dragon's Head, but just as in Beijing, the government signs tells you the eponymous structure and adjoining tower were decimated by the evil Allied Powers at the turn of the last century. The same signs brightly announce that at some point in the 1980s the Chinese government decided the Wall was probably worth keeping and actually had quite good tourist potential, so they began to rebuild in earnest - obviously I'm paraphrasing here...

02 Pass Under Heaven

Once we'd spent as long as the elements would allow feeling quite pleased with ourselves for having been bothered to visit both ends of the Wall, we took a short ride into town to see the main gate in the area, which is rather romantically known as the First Pass Under Heaven. For centuries this was the entrance to the Middle Kingdom from the barbarian lands beyond. It still dominates the town and you can only imagine how awe inspiring it was when it was built in 1381. The giant arch remained China's northern most boundary until it was breached by the Manchus in 1644, shortly before the fall of the Ming and establishment of the Qing Dynasty.