The Living Wall

Posted on August 29, 2006 by Emma & Brendan

There’s a fungus among us

It was a bit disturbing. There were black, flaking growths all along the face of the wall; dirty white pimples, fluorescent lime pustules, greenish warts. Should we be worried? Did our beloved Great Wall have a deadly disease?

Quite the opposite as it turned out, to our relief. A quick inquiry with Dr David Eldridge, of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, revealed that these are biological soil crusts, an entirely benign phenomenon and even an important component of soil health in arid and semi-arid environments.

Biological soil crusts are formed by living organisms that bind together particles of soils into a crust. They can be made up of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), mosses and lichens (composite plants consisting of fungi living symbiotically with algae). Biological soil crusts play an important role fixing nitrogen in the soil, improving soil’s resistance to wind and water erosion, and contributing to plant growth, but they are highly vulnerable to damage from livestock.

On the environment provided by the wall, however, biological crusts are very extensive and they’re in great shape, as it’s a bit hard for the sheep and goats to trample a vertical surface. The crusts are also quite pretty, almost like the coral of the desert (okay, it’s no Barrier Reef, but still). And like coral, they make a barrier, in this case the man-made barrier that is the Great Wall of China, come alive.

To draw one final parallel with coral, biological soil crusts come in endless variety. Luckily for us, we have one of Australia’s leading authorities on biological soil crusts on hand to provide tentative identifications. A big thank you to Dr David Eldridge for lending us his expertise!

The photos below are images of biological soil crusts and are excellent examples of the types of species that grow in highly calcareous (high pH) soil and in areas where gypsum is common in the soil.

The black lichen in this photo is a good example of a pioneering lichens called Collema coccophorum. It is a primitive (unstratified) lichen; i.e. the algal and fungal cells are mixed up in the lichen rather than being in layers. It fixes atmospheric nitrogen and makes it available to growing plants; a good thing in an environment where nutrients are limited.

Collema coccophorum is also the lichen that forms the dark patches evident in this photo of the wall . . . the aspect here is probably important; crusts like to be fully exposed to the light, and here there are no plants to shade them so they are able to dominate the exposed face of the wall and give it a lot of protection against wind and rain. The photo at the top of this post is more Collema, with a rosette of probably Caloplaca or Candelariella. The colours in the lichen are due to acids which make them more resistant to UV light.

This is a very dry looking moss, most likely Didymodon torquatus. It survives in a hostile environment by curling its leaves up against its stem. This reduces the surface area and prevents it from drying out. When it rains, this and many other similar mosses rapidly uncoil and begin photosynthesising.

Here we have a classic squamulose (warty) lichen of desert areas, Placidium squamulosum. Notice how the lichen forms little cracks and nooks in the soil surface. These are good niches for seeds to germinate in.

This is a rich community of squamulose Placidium squamulosum and Psora crystallifera (right at the bottom). This Psora has a pyramidal surface which helps it to diffuse light and reduce its surface temperature. Water also collects in the grooves on the lichen surface and may advantage cyanobacteria which grow in soil along the edge of the lichen. The greenish-whitish-yellow lichen is Xanthoparmelia, a foliose (leafy) lichen. It is very susceptible to excessive trampling. It relies on a small amount of fragmentation to establish in new areas, but too many hooves are deadly to this lichen. It is very slow growing.

The material in block quotes was provided by Dr David Eldridge of the School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales.

Read All About It!

Posted on August 28, 2006 by Emma & Brendan

Looking for the latest in Great Wall scholarship and news? The current issue of the China Heritage Quarterly, an online journal produced as part of the China Heritage Project at the Australian National University, is devoted to the Great Wall of China. The issue contains an editorial on conservation issues and tourism at the wall, profiles of some of China’s most important Great Wall scholars, a bibliography of Chinese-language wall scholarship, and more.

This special issue of the journal was produced in anticipation of the Powerhouse Museum’s Great Wall of China exhibition, which opens on 28 September 2006 in Sydney. Please click on the link in the first paragraph and have a look.

July-August Q&As

Posted on August 25, 2006 by Emma & Brendan

It’s that time again. The old email bag is full to overflowing and we’re fashionably late. It’s the monthly (or so) Q&As!

Once again, you’ve outdone yourselves with the quality of questions, and managed to cover some of our favourite topics (beer, music and food) to boot. Keep the questions coming!

How is the beer?

Hot. As in, unrefrigerated. As in, it’s 40 degrees out, you’re stumbling toward a nice shangdian (cornerstore) with a huge icebox out front, and it’s filled to the brim with ice cream for the local schoolkids while cases of beer bottles simmer in the afternoon sun.

In truth, it’s not as bad as all that. Most shops are in adobe buildings, which stay comfortably cool even in the worst heat, and the beer is usually kept on the floor or otherwise away from sunlight. And it’s high-quality beer. Many regional brands are owned by Tsing Tao; the beer seems to be brewed according to the same recipe or something very similar. A 750 ml bottle is two kuai, i.e. about 30 cents Australian. Refreshment comes cheap.

Best of all, the beer is plentiful. A village shop may be too small or poorly stocked to have bottled water, juice, soda or snacks, but you can count on one thing – there will be beer.

What do you eat?

Chinese food for breakfast, Chinese food for lunch, Chinese food for dinner. (Duh.)

More seriously, the food’s been fantastic, unexpectedly so. In all but the smallest villages there will be a noodle shop serving huge bowls of tasty, spicy broth with hand-pulled noodles, vegetables and meat. This usually costs 2 kuai (just like a beer – it’s all about balance) and is more than either of us can eat.

And while the rarity of refrigeration isn’t great for the beer, it’s actually a blessing when it comes to hiking food, i.e. food we can carry in our backpacks. This is because the shops stock a much greater variety of non-perishable foodstuffs than you’d find if refrigeration was common. We eat little sausages of chicken and pork (we don’t ask why they don’t need refrigeration, but no sickness so far), shrink-wrapped preserved hard-boiled eggs, peanuts and an enormous variety of biscuits, cookies, potato chips and other delectables.

When we pass a shop late in the day we’ll buy fresh tomatoes and either eat them like fruit or toss them in with the instant noodles (far superior to Western ramen, by the way) that we cook for dinner. We also shop the fruit markets, and watermelons, well, that’s a whole other post.

Emma preparing Brendan’s birthday dinner: Penne with tomatoes and black olives is a cut above our usual fare

A night market in Lanzhou

When we’re in the larger towns, we do bigger shops in the supermarkets, and we eat in regular Chinese restaurants or from street vendors. At some point, when we get around to it, we’ll do a few food posts, because there’s much more to say. But if there’s one thing we never have to worry about, it’s getting enough to eat.

A street vendor in Shandan

What kind of camera do you use?

We carry two digital cameras: an SLR and a little pocket point-and-shoot.

The point-and-shoot is a Canon S80, 8 megapixels, 3.6X optical zoom. It weighs less than a quarter kilo and slips easily into a shirt pocket.

Emma carries the S80 on the hipbelt of her pack, and we tend to use it quite often as we don’t need to remove our packs to take a photo. (For those of you wondering why there were more pictures of Brendan than Emma early on in the blog, it’s because she had the camera. We’re trying to correct the imbalance now that a few helpful readers have pointed it out.)

Most pictures of us walking or other day-to-day landscape-type shots are taken with the S80. We’re very happy with the image quality, especially considering the camera’s size. The downsides, of course, are the same as with any point-and-shoot: limited flexibility and somewhat lower quality.

Our SLR is a Canon 20D, also 8 megapixels, and we carry two lenses: a Canon EFS 17-85mm zoom and a Canon EFS 70-300mm zoom, both with image stabilisation. We don’t use the 20D as often as the S80 because we keep it inside Brendan’s backpack, but we do use it whenever we’re halfway serious about something, so a fairly high proportion of photos that appear on the blog are taken with it.

The 20D offers usable manual control that the S80 just can’t; also the lenses are a lot better, the ISO range is much greater (100-3200), and the image quality is better. Most of our photos of people, close-ups and action shots were taken with the 20D, and everything taken in low light without a flash was.

Can we expect any video footage?

We are carrying a Sony DV Handycam but aren’t using it as much as we had hoped. The Handycam stays in Emma’s backpack while we walk, so using it means taking off the pack, digging out the camera, filming, packing it up and putting the pack back on, all of which takes time and effort (probably doesn’t sound like much of an effort, but when all of our energy is going in to walking, you’d be surprised at how little energy is left).

We do have footage of some of our social situations which we will try to put up on the blog in the future, but that’s still in trial phase. We will be trying to use the camera more, so stay tuned.

How long does it take you to walk 25 kilometres on average?

The last week before Brendan got hurt we got a cool new toy: a new GPS that can run for about 30 hours on two rechargeable AA batteries. This means we can keep the GPS on all the time, which allows us to maintain more detailed records with a lot less effort, including our average speed when walking, our overall average speed (including breaks), total time walking, and total time screwing around.

As a result, we can tell you that in our most recent week of walking (July 30-August 5), we averaged between 4.5-4.7 kilometres per hour while walking. Actual times walking and resting per day vary considerably, but on average it would take us a bit less than five and a half hours of actual motion to walk 25 kilometres, and between 8 and 9 hours overall when you factor in breaks, lunch, siestas, late-afternoon beers, etc.

How often do you sleep out?

We sleep out probably 75 percent of the time. Depending on how tired we are, it’s often easier to walk out of town and find a well-protected campsite than it is to ask around town for a place to stay. But if we need electricity to charge our various toys and don’t feel like instant noodles for dinner, we will try to walk to a town large enough to have a guesthouse in it.

How do you deal with the creepy crawlies at night?

Fortunately we haven’t had to deal with many creepy crawlies. When we camp out in the open, Emma is vigilant about keeping the tent doors zipped shut. So far, the guesthouses we’ve stayed in have been relatively clean and haven’t offered much in the way of eight-legged visitors. Hearing other stories from other travelers, it sounds like we’ve been quite lucky.

This “luck” can probably be attributed to the climate and region we’ve been in for our first two months. The desert, although home to the dreaded desert cicada, is a dry, barren place. Basically there are a few beetles, the odd centipede, and some really annoying things that look like large ticks. Emma was worried about the beetles at first because they storm towards you when you stop walking for even a minute, but after silently observing them crawl towards Brendan one day and then back off after they’d checked him out, she realised that their defence strategy was all show.

Also, when your legs are aching and you’re really, really tired, you develop ways to ignore the little buggers. That said, they are kind of interesting, and since they’re about the only wildlife we see (apart from birds, which don’t sit still very nicely), we do snap off the occasional shot.

Son of the desert cicada

A kissing cousin, maybe?

The lacy wings of this dragonfly are beautiful; click the picture to see it properly

Has anyone else ever “walked the wall?”

Quite a few people have.

Dong Yaohui, currently Secretary-General of the China Great Wall Society, hiked it from east to west over 508 days in 1984-85 (see our earlier post, “A Great Celebration”). Liu Yutian, a railway worker from Xinjiang, walked the wall in 1985-86. Other Chinese people may have walked the length of the wall, but we don’t read Chinese well enough to research the question properly.

A fair number of Westerners have traveled the wall by foot. William Lindesay, an Englishman, ran the length of the wall in 1987; you can read about his adventures on his website at http://www.wildwall.com/ and in his book Alone on the Great Wall. Our friends Eddie Davis and Beau Bacevicius, two Americans and to our knowledge the youngest people to walk the wall, completed the journey in 2000; their story is at http://www.studenttraveler.com/mag/01-01/china.php. Gayle Hall, an American, became the first Western woman to walk the Great Wall (as far as we know) when she completed the journey with two Chinese companions in 2002 (see “China’s Great Wall made for a great walk”; the Chinese companions are not named in the article). Nathan Gray, a New Zealander, completed a wall-walk in 2000-2002; his journey is recorded on his website http://www.oakroad.net/nathangray/folder-2877.html and in his book First Pass Under Heaven.

Lest you think we’re simply ambling along a well-trodden path, however, let us assure you: NEVER BEFORE has an Australian-American couple consisting of a 33-year-old (when we finish) Australian woman and a 41-year-old American man with Australian permanent residency hiked the length of the Great Wall. It’s unprecedented!

Have you encountered many different kinds of music?

Care for Kenny G? The Carpenters? Barry Manilow? Then you’ll love China.

The largest music market in the world (potentially) has a weakness for the syrupy Western love song. From Muslim night markets in China’s western provinces to the skyscrapers of Beijing and Shanghai, you will never be far from music that went out of fashion when bell-bottoms did (the first time). If you didn’t learn all of the words to “Top of the World” when you were a kid, rest assured, after a few months in China you will.

You’ll also hear plenty of home-grown love songs in the Middle Kingdom. Earlier this summer it was impossible to get away from a damnably catchy song in Chinese called “Hui Lai” (“Come Back”). In fact, even now that we’re out of China, it seems to have permanently lodged itself in our brains.

But there is more to music in China, it’s just not blaring from the speaker of every second shop stall. At festivals like Naadam in Mongolia, we hear traditional forms or interesting combinations of traditional forms melded with rock.

This monk is playing at a Buddhist ceremony marking the beginning of the Mongolian festival Naadam

A traditional Mongolian ensemble; note the carved horse heads atop the necks of the instruments

Also, Beijing has a large and growing rock scene. We didn’t have time to see many bands while preparing for the trip but the few bands we did see were great.

For much better info than we can give you here on Beijing rock, go to http://www.chaile.org/. It has podcasts too.

Will you need to get new hiking boots?

We expect to go through at least two pairs of boots apiece, probably three in Brendan’s case because he needs more support now for his bunged-up feet. The boots do take a bit of a beating, not just from hiking, but also from water and mud (we know, it’s a desert, it’s hard to explain).

I’ve told her time and time again . . .

Good hiking boots for our large feet (Emma’s long feet, Brendan’s wide feet) aren’t available in rural China, so we’ve pre-bought the boots that we like and that we know won’t need much wearing in. We’ll have those sent to us somewhere along the wall when we need them.

How’s Brendan’s foot?

Actually, no one has asked this question recently, but we assume it’s because y’all are too shy.

Our more recent medical appointments have confirmed the initial diagnosis of a stress fracture to the third metatarsal of Brendan’s right foot, and it’s looking as though we’ll still be off the wall for a few weeks. We’re doing all we can to speed recovery (keep your eyes out for a post on all of the rockin’ rehab Brendan’s doing) and hope to be back on the wall in late September.

We’ll still be posting several times a week between now and then, though, so don’t go away.

Labrang Lamasery

Posted on August 21, 2006 by Emma & Brendan

The narrow streets of Labrang

If you can’t get to the great Buddhist lamaseries of Tibet, or if you pale at the thought of extreme high-altitude meditation, the Labrang Lamasery is probably the next best thing. With ancient temples, stupas and prayer halls nestled in among towering peaks and some 800 Buddhist monks robed in red roaming the streets, Labrang has all of the grandeur for which Tibet is famous, without the difficulty of access.

Located in Xiahe (near the Sangke Grasslands) at an altitude just under 3000 metres, Labrang is the most important monastery for Tibetan Buddhism outside of Tibet proper. It was founded in 1709 by the First Jamyang Zhaypa, Ngawang Tsondru, a disciple of the Fifth Dalai Lama, and is one of the few monasteries for the Gelukpa (Yellow Hat) school.

A member of the Yellow Hat Sect at prayer

A monk looking on from the roof of a hall

A Tibetan woman heading home after praying

The monastery complex is huge, with 18 halls and six colleges spread over seven square kilometres. It is surrounded by prayer wheels, which pilgrims spin clockwise on their way into a temple or as they walk around the sacred buildings of the monastery.

Prayer wheels at rest

A monk spinning the prayer wheels

At its height in the 1950s, the monastery housed 4000 Tibetan, Han Chinese and Mongolian monks. However, the whole place was shut down by the Communist Government in 1958. The monastery’s fortunes declined further during the Cultural Revolution, and many of the buildings were vandalised. Labrang only reopened as a functioning monastery in 1980, and rebuilding from the destruction of the Cultural Revolution continues today.

One of the two main stupas in the monastery

Young monks rearranging their robes in the wind

Monks join the monastery as young as 10 years of age

Many of the temples are closed to independent visitors, so we joined one of the group tours guided by English-speaking monks. Our visit happened to coincide with the arrival of a highly respected Tibetan lama and teacher, so we felt bad that our poor guide, who was extremely patient and calm, was stuck with us while all the other monks got to pay their respects to the visiting teacher.

Monks making their way to see the arrival of the lama

Waiting for a glimpse of the great teacher

Bowing as the lama drove out

We insisted our guide go over, but he just stared from a distance

Our guide took us through the main prayer hall, a huge room with row after row of prayer mats for the monks, colourful ribbons cascading from the roof, walls dotted with rolls of sutras and numerous rooms with statues of the Buddha. The monks in their yellow hats kneeling in that smoky, dimly lit hall, would have made for some great pictures, but (fortunately for the monks wanting to pray in peace) photography was not allowed.

The hall was filled with the scent of melted yaks’ butter from the hundreds of candles and urns placed around the hall (imagine the world’s biggest bucket of hot-buttered popcorn and you’ll get the idea). Yaks’ butter seems a versatile product – not only is it good for tea, candles and urns, but festival sculptures are also made from the stuff. And in a pretty impressive way, too.

A sculpture like this takes hundreds of hours to make but will only last a few months

I can’t believe it’s butter!

A Little Slice of Tibet

Posted on August 17, 2006 by Emma & Brendan

MEAT!!!

Our waitress set down a platter of mutton, a stack of the thin tissues that pass for napkins in China, and an elbow-length disposable plastic glove, then walked out of our tent. There were no plates or forks. No chopsticks. No instruction manual.

We eventually figured out that the glove was for holding the greasy hunk of meat, the knife played its usual role, and the rest of the work was performed by the God-given utensils at the ends of our arms.

Thus we were introduced to the finer points of Tibetan cuisine – meat, milk tea, meat, butter tea, meat . . . meat. Okay, that’s probably not fair, but it is true that the mountainous lands inhabited by Tibetans, hidden under snow for much of the year, yield little in the way of fruit and vegetables and a lot in the way of animal products. Certainly where we were, in the Sangke Grasslands outside the town of Xiahe, the focus was on local products.

Our tent’s the one with the pointy roof

Although it’s not in (or even especially near) Tibet proper, Xiahe is a Tibetan village and the surrounding grasslands are important for Tibetan graziers – another bit of diversity in the ethnic salad bowl that is Gansu province – diversity that was conspicuously on display on the drive up.

We began the day in Lanzhou, a mostly Han Chinese city of 10 million people and the capital of Gansu province, where we were taking some time off the wall to rest and see a few sights. As we drove up through the foothills, we passed numerous mosques, many of them new, constructed by people of the Hui minority, the Muslim people of north-central China. Gradually we left the mosques and minarets behind, the valleys opened up into subalpine grasslands, and we began to see colourful Tibetan tents along the rivers and shaggy yaks wandering alongside the roads.

Yakety Yak, Yakety Yak

We think the one with a white face might be half-yak, half-cow, but we’re not exactly yaksperts

The tents (and yaks) reached maximum density when we got to Sangke, at an elevation of about 3000 metres. The grasslands are among the largest in the area and, together with the nearby Labrang Buddhist monastery, make Xiahe an important tourist destination.

The tent village at Sangke Grasslands

Although the place was mostly deserted when we were there, there are dozens of tents available for rent by the day or hour, each of them fully equipped with couches, TV, DVD, home theatre system, and most importantly (to Chinese men at least), ashtrays. Then it’s order a few huge slabs o’ meat; slip a disc into the player; and eat, drink, smoke and play cards to your heart’s delight (if that’s your idea of fun).

Rough Country

Posted on August 14, 2006 by Emma & Brendan

Are we having fun yet?

For the first couple hundred kilometres of our trip, the walking was easy. We had more than our share of hot days, and we were forced to carry a lot of weight in water; but apart from a few bumps around Xiakou, the terrain was remarkably gentle. (Okay, it was rough enough for Brendan to injure his foot, but then Brendan once managed to break a rib playing pool.)

Anyway, for the entire month of June, walking over a distance of nearly 400 kilometres, our total elevation gain was 1837 metres. For a mountain climber, that’s not even a big day.

But easy street ended rather abruptly. Just east of Wuwei, where we set off in search of the mythical blonde-haired Chinese, the Qilian Shan mountain range tails off to the south and the runoff that feeds Hexi Corridor agriculture dribbles away with it. As we walked out of the town of Tumen, the wall ascended some small sandy rises. Within the space of a few kilometres, endless horizons were replaced with waves of hills and valleys, and where we once crossed shallow desert washes and lazy irrigation overflows, we were now negotiating canyons with sheer walls hundred of metres deep.

The wall rising to the foothills

The wall disappearing into a canyon east of Tumen

This canyon was too steep to cross; we had to walk to the head of it and around

The reason for all these ups and downs is loess, a fine-grained, fertile – and importantly for us – highly erodible soil. Loess covers over 400,000 square kilometres of north-central China, a region known as the Loess Plateau; and the soil goes a long way down: 50-80 metres deep on average, 150 metres deep in places. This soil is so soft you can dig a decent hole with your bare hands, so you can just imagine what a bit of water, a steep gradient and thousands of years can do.

Loess fluting

Brendan approaching yet another canyon

Loess tan! It’s safe, effective and washes away with water!

Loess has played an important role in Chinese history; it’s really no exaggeration to say it’s the dirt that gave birth to China. Loess is not only fertile, it is also easily worked with simple tools. As a result, some of China’s oldest agricultural settlements were founded on the most easily irrigated portions of the Loess Plateau. Many of China’s oldest buildings were made of rammed loess; so is much of the wall.

Loess continues to be an important building material to this day. Most of the buildings in the small villages we’ve passed through are constructed from adobe brick. In the area east of Tumen, the loess is deep enough to construct large, comfortable caves suitable for permanent habitation. In these foothills there are entire villages of cave dwellings.

A cave village

All of that fertile soil isn’t much good unless there’s water, though, and there is precious little of it in the foothills where we walked. In the flatter bottomlands, we saw small fields of dryland wheat; in the uplands, however, the fields have mostly been abandoned – whether that is due to drier conditions or other environmental constraints, or simply because marginal agriculture no longer makes sense when there are opportunities in towns such as Tumen a mere 20 kilometres away, we don’t know. Regardless of the reason, the foothills have been left to shepherds, and these days the villages of caves are largely, though not completely, uninhabited.

One of the few caves still in use

The newspapers in this abandoned cave date from 1995

A Break in the Wall – Or Brendan’s Foot Part 2

Posted on August 14, 2006 by Emma & Brendan

It looks like the wall may not do us in for good … not this time, anyway. The last you heard was post-X-ray in Beijing where we were told Brendan’s foot injury was a possible stress fracture. Both X-rays and MRI, however, did not show any clear break, though there was visible damage to the bone of his right third toe.

Break or not, at least four weeks off the wall was recommended, so we decided it was better to come home where we could meet with his previous foot surgeon and work out a physiotherapy programme that would have us back on the wall as soon as possible.

Don’t worry, honey, I’ll carry the bags. Photo by George Nicholas

We also thought, having eaten healthy Chinese food for weeks on end, that it would be beneficial for us to slip a few pies and sausage rolls into our diet to put some weight on the big guy, who was rapidly losing it.

Beef and curry, mmmm

Naturally, our family and friends were eager to see us – just as eager as they are to see us finish the walk. But there was one furry little creature who was especially excited to have us home.

Right on the kisser. Photo by Penny Jost

We’ve said all we need to say about the foot for the time being, so it’s catch-up time – starting with the next story, we’ll be posting our backlog from the last three weeks, picking up where we left off in eastern Gansu province.

And now, back to our regular programming.

Bad News

Posted on August 8, 2006 by Emma & Brendan

It’s ALWAYS Brendan

Brendan’s right foot is injured. It’s probably a stress fracture, but X-rays aren’t conclusive and we won’t know anything definite until an MRI is done in a few days.

We are likely off the wall for at least four weeks, possibly longer. Obviously it’s very disappointing for us. We’ve spent a lot of time and effort on this trip, and we were enjoying ourselves and making good progress. But so it goes.

As things currently stand, we plan to resume our walk as soon as we can. When that is we don’t know and probably won’t for quite a while, as our return date will depend on Brendan’s response to rehabilitation as well as the severity of his injury, whatever that turns out to be. Of course, we’ll keep you informed on the site.

There is a tiny silver lining in this dark cloud. We’ve been chronically behind in posting, and right now we’ve got about a four-week backlog of posts. Finally we have all the time we need to clear out that backlog.

So in one way at least, things will be pretty normal around here. We’ll write about things that actually happened weeks ago as though they happened yesterday and fantasize about that day when we’re finally caught up and can post about things as they take place. With luck, when that day comes we’ll be back on the wall.

Walking the Wall

A journey along the Great Wall of China

Monthly Archives: August 2006