Have you been to the Great Wall of China?
Why the answer to the question of whether you have been to the Great Wall of China is trickier than it might seem
Every visitor to China eventually has the same conversation. Someone asks if you have been to the Great Wall. You say, “Yes”, and they ask which bit. You realise, often for the first time, that the question is more pointed than it sounds.
There is, in the end, one Great Wall: a 2,000-year building project begun by competing kingdoms before China was unified, linked and extended by the first emperor after unification, Qin Shi Huang, and rebuilt in the Ming period, from 1368 onwards, into the version everyone now pictures.
What survives is another matter. A national survey completed in 2012 counted 10,051 wall sections, 1,764 trenches and ramparts, 29,510 watchtowers, and 2,211 forts and passes, with a total length of 21,196.18km (13,170.7 miles). Two-and-a-half-thousand years of collapse, farming, desertification and warfare did to the wall what time does to everything eventually: broke it into many parts.
Badaling: the one everyone means
Badaling is one of the famous sections closest to Beijing, the first to open to the public, in 1957, and the one most visitors picture when they think of the Great Wall. It is also the most heavily developed section, and the most crowded. Both its north and south stretches have cable cars, and the north side has added a toboggan slideway, with little one-person sledges sent back down the slope at a speed Ming-dynasty officials presumably did not intend. It is here that you can see the most-photographed stretch of the Great Wall, though your legs may be less amused than your eyes.