Walking the Wall

In ways both good and bad, Mutianyu is a sort of Badaling Lite. Like Badaling, it’s extensively reconstructed, but more of the original materials are incorporated, and to our untutored but reasonably experienced eyes the reconstruction at Mutianyu seems more authentic. As at Badaling, there’s an assortment of tourist facilities ranging from the outrageously tacky to the slightly less tacky – cable cars, toboggan rides, vendors and hotels – but at Mutianyu the bells and whistles intrude less on the Great Wall experience. And of course there are tourists at Mutianyu, but you’d be hard pressed to call them crowds.

A lonely stretch on the tourist section

However, unlike at Badaling, the original wall is easily accessible from the developed section. Well-preserved unreconstructed wall extends from both ends of the tourist site, toward Jiankou in the west and down to the village of Xhuadi in the east.

Now, there is the small matter of signs forbidding entry to the unreconstructed sections, but as with many rules in China, it’s hard to know whether you should take the signs’ prohibitions seriously. Just a few kilometres beyond the “Entry Forbidden” sign at the western end of the Mutianyu tourist site, there are well-maintained and well-trodden trails leading from near the village of Xizhazi to the unreconstructed Mutianyu wall, with signage sponsored by the Beijing 2008 Olympics Committee and BHP Billiton. So, if you take both sets of signs at face value, it’s okay to go onto the unreconstructed section of Mutianyu from the west but not from the east. Or you can just do what everyone else does, and ignore the signs prohibiting entry.

Don’t arrest me, I’m coming from the west!

Anyhow, we did catch a few quiet moments at Mutianyu, especially in the unreconstructed section. Some of the watchtowers seemed almost like little Chinese gardens, and Mutianyu was by far the lushest part of the wall we’ve seen.

Inside one of Mutianyu’s many watchtowers

Awwwww

The view from where we rejoined the wall after Jiankou

Despite enjoying ourselves, we came away from Mutianyu feeling uneasy about the tourist development there. As we mentioned in our Badaling post, it seems necessary to us that there be one site on the Great Wall developed for mass tourism – it’s entirely appropriate that such an important symbol of China be made easily accessible to everyone, and that probably means large scale tourist facilities, souvenir stands and huge car parks crowded with tour buses.

The Mutianyu chairlift and toboggan (cable cars are at another spot)

But what’s arguably appropriate in one place is not necessarily appropriate everywhere, and we didn’t see the need for chairlifts, tobbogans and wholesale wall reconstruction at Mutianyu – it seems to us that one Badaling is quite enough. And while the reconstruction at Mutianyu may be more authentic than Badaling’s and the tourist facilities more restrained, we’re just not sure we see the point.