Walking the Wall

For millions of people around the world, Badaling is the Great Wall of China. With its blockish watchtowers, uniform crenellations, and smooth brick and stonework, the Badaling wall looks like a Great Wall should – an endless, horizontal (and sometimes vertical) castle, twisting along knife-edge ridges and climbing dangerous peaks. It’s no wonder the place has become – and has been intentionally cultivated as – a symbol not just of the Great Wall but also China generally.

Now that’s what I call a Great Wall!

Ironically, though, Badaling was not directly on our route; we had to take a side trip to see it. Not far from the Yellow River, several hundred kilometres west of Beijing, the wall splits into inner and outer sections, which rejoin just outside of Beijing. When planning our trip, we decided to hike along the outer wall, as there are fewer long gaps over the route as a whole. Badaling is located on the inner wall, a significant detour from our path.

What we didn’t plan so well was the date of our visit. Bright and early on May Day, one of the biggest holidays of the year in China and maybe the busiest possible time to go to Badaling, we hopped into a cab and made our way to China’s Number 1 tourist destination.

The holiday bottleneck at the entrance to the Badaling wall

As such an important and symbolic site, Badaling comes in for its fair share of criticism, maybe even more than its fair share. First on the list of complaints are the crowds, which are legendary, and we can testify that this particular legend of the Great Wall is solidly grounded in fact. It took our cab driver a good 45 minutes to drive the several hundred metres from the entry gate to our hotel, and once we’d checked in and dropped our bags, we made our way to the wall and were swept into a human river so mighty our only choices were to go with the flow or drown.

Come on in, the water’s fine!

A second complaint, especially among Westerners, is excessive commercialisation; and there’s definitely no lack of money-makers – legitimate and less so – to be found at Badaling. You can buy Great Wall caps, T-shirts and certificates of achievement, not to mention countless baubles and trinkets that have nothing to do with the Great Wall, or even China. You can ride camels, horses and cable cars. You can go to restaurants where there are no prices on the English menu and the staff apparently feels free to randomly make up prices for customers who can’t read Chinese menus (or at least look like they can’t – after being absurdly overcharged for our lunch, we complained to management and pointed out that we’d been charged 30% more than the prices on the Chinese menu – we got our refunds but obviously the scam works most of the time).

Get one for every member of the family!

We thought we deserved a ride up

Giddyup!

Despite all this, we really had a good time at Badaling, and it looked to us like most of the other people there were having fun as well. The wall, which has been totally reconstructed, seemed more Disneyfied than necessary to us, but as for the crowds and commercialisation, it struck us as inevitable that there would be at least one site on the wall given over to mass tourism and the almighty RMB. Given its proximity to Beijing, that place was probably always going to be Badaling (we are less sanguine about some of the changes happening at less touristed spots near Beijing).

Not a bad spot to impress your honey

It also seemed to us that it really is possible to get a sense of the wall from a visit to Badaling. By about 4 o’clock, once the giant tour groups had boarded their buses and headed back to Beijing, stretches of the wall were surprisingly peaceful. Sure, the bricks weren’t original, the pavement was too smooth, and the handrails weren’t quite what we were used to. But the spring green was as fresh as it would have been 500 years ago, the afternoon sun threw lovely shadows across the pavement, and when we squinted and looked out to the west, we swear we saw a group of Mongol horsemen in the distance.

Badaling spring

You can always count on us for the obvious shot

Even Badaling has its quiet moments