Beijing and the Great Wall

The next morning I went with a large group to the Hong Kong airport and we flew to Beijing for a three-day trip that involved hiking along the Great Wall of China. The first day we had a long hike along a section of the Great Wall. Competing Chinese warlords to protect their individual kingdoms originally built the wall. Later all of the smaller walls were joined together by an emperor who unified all of China and wanted to protect it against invasion by the Mongols to the north. It was 8,000 miles long, and there are watchtowers every 300 meters where guards would look out for attackers and light a smoke signal warning if they saw anything. If the wall were transferred to America, it would reach from Texas to Rhode Island.

The part of the wall we were on the first day was one of the oldest sections, and has not been restored like some other parts of the wall have been, so it was dangerous hiking and the wall was overgrown. It was still very impressive, the wall runs through mountains separating the rest of China from Inner Mongolia, and I could see it along the top of the ridges. When we finished the first hike we went to our hotel, which was in the outskirts of Beijing. We went to dinner at a restaurant where we got to try lots of different types of Chinese food. Instead of each person ordering a meal, we all sat around a big round table with a spinning disk in the center and they brought us lots of different small dishes that we could all try. If anyone wanted more of anything they just had to spin the disk in the center until that dish was in front of them.

The second day of hiking we picked up from where we had left on the first day. A bus took us from the hotel to the wall, and we had another, shorter, hike along the next bit of wall. This section had been more restored, and although the steps and paving stones were still uneven, this part of the wall had sides and the guard towers were more intact. The second day of hiking had a lot of stairs, and it was a lot of work to climb up all of them.

On our last day in Beijing we toured the city. We visited Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is a huge open space in the center of Beijing that is in front of the main gate to the Forbidden City. Many important government buildings line the square, and Chairman Mao, a former leader of China, is also buried in a building on one side of the Square. Mao made China into a communist country and led it through the Cultural Revolution, an attempt to change China’s very strict social structure. Unfortunately, his plans were not very successful, and the Great Leap Forward, a plan to bring China into the 20th century, resulted in the deaths of millions of people. However, Mao is still a national hero in China, and there was a huge line waiting to see his coffin. We didn’t get to see it, but we went straight into the Forbidden City, which is where the emperors of China lived until 1925 when the last emperor was thrown out of the city and it was opened to the public. It is a huge area of Beijing, and there used to be certain rooms that only the emperor could go in. I couldn’t believe how big it was, and what a luxurious life the emperor must have led.