In 2009 the last 30 minutes of the journey are spent on a smooth tarmacked road, where we stop at some well-maintained toilets before passing through a vehicle checkpoint. The dull-green clad security guard waves us through and we reach a car-park, big enough for coaches, that signals the end of the road. We exit the van, show our tickets at the metal turnstiles, and proceed along the tarmac and up the stone steps until the Great Wall, hitherto hidden, appears... and with it, the obligatory souvenir sellers and self-appointed guides.
simatai great wall still remains with an inexorable sense of existence; a creation neither beautiful nor romantic, but over 6000km of historical inevitability. Urban legend has it that the Great Wall can be seen from the moon, but it’s not true, and it seems a shame. For as nothing else could ever be, the Great Wall is the embodiment of a journey through centuries of Chinese politics and ideology; built stone on painstaking stone by the hands of generations of labourers; millions of whom gave their lives to its construction, defence and re-construction.
In the flaring sunlight of mid-winter, the Great Wall seems lonely. An old hand at climbing the pointed hills, it is as indifferent to our laboured steps up its vertiginous inclines, as it is to our awe at reaching yet another watchtower on yet another pinnacle.
The views are magnificent in winter. Far better than in summer, when the heat and pollution even so far from Beijing, combine to cast a murky sky overhead. The surrounding landscape is surprisingly harsh; the peaks deliberately sharp. This is not the land of rolling hills but of nature’s well-honed knives. And in the nooks and crannies, the signs of human endeavour – terraced plots filled in the summer months with sweet corn – are now lifeless sketches, just pencil-lines on the brown land.
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