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China gives its old wall facelift

By Jack Souther Ever since our first ancestors descended from the forest canopy and drew a line in the sand human beings have been protecting their turf with barriers of one sort or another.

By Jack Souther

Ever since our first ancestors descended from the forest canopy and drew a line in the sand human beings have been protecting their turf with barriers of one sort or another. In medieval times trenches filled with water or burning oil had limited success. France's heavily fortified Maginot Line didn't stop Hitler's armies from going around it. And when people decided they didn't really want to be separated the Berlin Wall was knocked down. Other more ephemeral barriers, Russia's iron curtain and China's bamboo curtain, no longer serve a purpose but even as they fade into history new barriers are being built to keep Palestinians out of Israel and Mexicans out of Texas. But of all mankind's "lines in the sand" the Great Wall of China is in a class of its own.

Local guides insist it is one of the few man-made structures large enough to be seen from the moon — a dubious claim since much of the wall had crumbled into dust long before Neil Armstrong took his "giant leap for mankind". But you don't need an astronaut's perspective to appreciate the enormity of China's Great Wall or the human effort that went into its making. Standing atop one of the watchtowers, high above Juyong Pass I am overwhelmed by the size of this massive stone structure snaking up precipitous slopes and along narrow-crested mountain ridges for as far the eye can see.

We elected to visit Juyong Pass, only 50 km northwest of Beijing, rather than the more popular, and crowded, section of the wall at Badaling, 20 km farther into the mountains. Both of these sections have been extensively repaired, but the reconstruction is faithful to the original and does not detract from the wall's grandeur. Badaling, which Betty visited on her 1977 tour of China, was first restored and opened to tourists in 1957 but it wasn't until Richard Nixon's visit in 1972 that the tourism industry took much notice. His remark, "it sure is a great wall", brought a flood of visitors and today millions of tourists come each year to clamber over its remains.

Not surprisingly the wall's history has received a facelift, along with its bricks and mortar. The popular concept of a single wall designed and built to keep out the barbarian hordes and stretching more than 5,000 km across the northern frontiers of China is mostly myth. Wall building in China goes back to earliest times and, during the "Warring States period" (457-221 BC) each little kingdom had its own wall. Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor, is usually credited with building the original "Great Wall". After unifying the country in 221 BC he conscripted peasant labour to link up the existing walls of the warring states into a continuous barrier across the top of his new empire. That was almost 2,000 years before the Juyong Pass and Badaling sections of the Great Wall were built. Local guides and most guidebooks gloss over this period of two millennia by asserting that subsequent dynasties repaired and rebuilt the wall, maintaining Qin Shi Huang's original structure throughout most of Chinese history. But, according to historian Arthur Waldron, the real story is much more complicated.

At the root of China's frontier problem was the basic incompatibility of its agrarian society with the nomadic people to the north. The Chinese regarded their border as the boundary between civilization and the barbarian hoards of Huns, Turks, Mongols, and others who roamed the steppe. However, building walls was only one way of dealing with them. Depending on its "homeland security policy" some dynasties did indeed strengthen and extend parts of the wall — a futile exercise that failed to keep out Genghis Khan's Mongols, who conquered China and established the Yuan Dynasty in 1278, or the Manchu who outflanked the wall and stormed into Beijing in 1644. For much of its 2,000-year history Imperial China allowed the Great Wall to crumble and, through trade and diplomacy, maintained a guarded coexistence with the nomads, many of whom were absorbed into Chinese society. But a change in policy during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) ushered in a new era of wall-building.

Unable to defeat the Mongol cavalry sniping at its northern border the Ming embarked on a massive campaign to exclude them. More than 5,000 km of defensive barriers, seven metres high and equally as thick, were draped across the frontier and a second line of walls, including the Juyong Pass and Badaling sections, was built to protect the capital at Beijing. Not only physical barriers the walls were designed to provide an early-warning system and rapid response corridor for troops. The approach of raiding parties was relayed from tower to tower by smoke signals from burning wolf dung or, at night, by lighting signal fires. In the end it didn't work. Parts of the wall were still being built in 1644 when Manchu forces outflanked it, swept in from the north, and overthrew the last of the Ming Emperors.

The Manchus not only conquered China they controlled and absorbed the Mongols and other nomadic people of the Steppe. The Qing Dynasty they founded ruled over a vast empire that included Inner and Outer Mongolia, Tibet, and Turkestan. No longer on a frontier, and no longer needed as a line of defense the Great Wall, a colossal military folly, was abandoned, left to slump into rubble, its bricks scavenged for other projects. By 1911, when the Qing Dynasty and Imperial China were replaced by Sun Yatsen's Republican Government the Great Wall was already in ruin, but more was to come.

During the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong the Red Guard went on an ideological rampage to destroy everything and anything old. Books were burned, ancient monuments desecrated and hundreds of kilometres of the remaining Great Wall were destroyed, its bricks carted off to build roads, reservoirs, and foundations for the new Peoples Republic of China. It was tourism, or the promise of it, that brought an end to the carnage — a realization that the wall, though it had failed to keep people out, had enormous potential to bring people (and revenue) in. Reconstruction of the old Ming walls began in the 1950s and while much of the original material had already been lost forever the fragments that remain are faithfully incorporated into the restored structure. The stone steps that lead us back to the valley are held in place with new mortar but the stones themselves, worn smooth by millions of footsteps, are part of China's ancient wall.

Redefining the Great Wall from an extravagant military failure to a symbol of China's greatest achievements got a boost in 1984 when Deng Xiaoping himself inscribed a plaque reading, "Let us love our country and restore our Great Wall." As a feat of engineering, the product of many millions of days of hand labour, the Great Wall is unsurpassed in its shear magnitude. Extending for more than 5,000 km from the East China Sea to the Gobi Desert it is one of China's most prized icons.

Before returning to our bus we paused at one of the lower signal towers for a final look at the wall winding up the mountains across the valley. The steep slopes are ribbed with horizontal terrace-like rows cut into the low brush — the inner edge of a new wall to combat a new threat advancing on China's northern frontier. Even as the bricks and mortar of the old wall are being renovated China's "Great Green Wall" is being built, not to keep out the desert nomads, but to keep out the desert itself. Each year the dunes of the Gobi desert advance another two kilometres closer to Beijing, leaving behind abandoned towns, refugees, and thousands of square kilometres of new desert that, until a few years ago, was arable land. And every spring, as the winds whip out of the Gobi and gather loess in the overgrazed and over cultivated steppes of Inner Mongolia, Beijing is smothered in dust. Wearing masks to help them breathe its citizens have endured grit-filled air "black winds" and "mud rains".

The Great Green Wall, which skirts the Gobi Desert for almost 5,000 km across the northwest rim of China, is a massive reforestation project. Designed to stem the tide of sand by planting millions of trees, it was started 70 years ago and is scheduled to continue through 2050. How effective it has been depends on who you ask. My Beijing guidebook reports a dramatic reduction in the number of dust storms between 2001 and 2003. But a note in the 2005 Lonely Planet reports that few of the millions of new seedlings have survived and that little is being done to address the root causes of the problem — air pollution, erosion, and corruption. It remains to be seen whether China's new wall will be any more effective than the old one in securing its vulnerable northwestern border.