长城 国家地理03/01/01

2008-02-14 12:44:37 来自: KK

Chasing the wall: how I drove 7,436 miles and found the good, the bad and the real great wall of China.
From: National Geographic
Date: January 1, 2003
Author: Hessler, Peter

There is always at least one happy person at a Chinese funeral. I learned this while driving across the north of China, where lessons were plentiful. I also learned to avoid driving at night, or in the rain, or on the tiny red roads that squiggled like aimless capillaries across my map. I learned that most Chinese gas station attendants are young women, and they often give you a free pair of white cotton driving gloves with a fill-up. I learned to be wary of black Volkswagen Santanas, because in rural China they are frequently occupied by low-level Communist Party officials, who are among the most aggressive motorists anywhere in the country. There are lots of black Volkswagen Santanas in the north of China.
I was heading west. I had a rented Jeep, a tent, and a sleeping bag. I had my worries--I didn't know how the Chinese authorities would react to a foreigner taking a solo road trip, and as a precaution I planned to divide my journey into two parts, fall and spring. From my home in Beijing, I drove to Hebei Province, where I began my journey at the edge of the Bo Hai sea. I intended to follow rural roads along the path of what has come to be known as the Great-Wall.
The Great Wall has become a symbol for China, and yet it has been consistently misunderstood over the past century. In the popular consciousness, the Great Wall is a unified concept, but in fact northern China is crisscrossed by many different walls built by many different dynasties. It wasn't until modern times, through a combination of foreign misconception and Chinese patriotism, that the ancient walls were symbolically linked by the use of a singular term. Many of the Great Wall's supposed characteristics--that it is continuous, that the entire structure is over 2,000 years old, that it can be seen from the moon--are false. I was chasing a myth, and on the road I hoped to meet people who could help me untangle the truth. Scholars or specialists didn't particularly interest me--instead I hoped to meet average Chinese who, living near the ancient fortifications, would have their own view of the past and the present.
I began in autumn, when the Hebei harvest had been deliberately left out in the road, waiting to be threshed by passing cars. Millet, sorghum, wheat--the chaff cracked beneath my tires. The ancient walls hovered like stone mirages atop the hills. I could gauge my distance by a glance at the glove compartment. Steadily it filled with white cotton gloves as the Jeep cruised west.
I stopped for funerals all the way across Shanxi Province. The first was in the small town of Xinrong, where the main street had been blocked off by a crowd of 500. They had gathered to watch a traveling folk opera troupe perform in memory of a departed businessman named He Yu. He had owned the biggest shop in Xinrong--the Prosperous Fountainhead Store--and the opera troupe had been hired to perform directly across from the shop entrance. Even in death, He was doing good business--it was a seven-day funeral, and mourners wandered into the store and browsed whenever the actors took a break. The troupe's stage was a converted Beijing 130 truck, its railings removed and replaced by loudspeakers. Wei Fu, the head of the troupe, grinned beneath his greasepaint and told me that 80 percent of his business comes from funerals. "Of course I'm sorry for the family," he said, "but this is my living."
Zhang Baolong wore that same grin the following day. I was driving south and west from Xinrong, and the landscape had become barren--low dry hills punctuated by the occasional signal tower that had been part of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) defense system. I pulled off the road to look at one of the ancient towers, and then I heard the wails of the funeral nearby. When I approached, a pudgy man handed me his business card. It announced in Chinese: Zhang Baolong/Feng Shui Master/Red and White Events: Services for the Entire Length of the Dragon, From the Beginning to the End.
Twenty-seven separate services were listed on the back of the card. Some were easily defined as red, or joyful ("selecting marriage partner"), and others were clearly white ("choosing grave sites"), but occasionally the colors blurred. Zhang also handled "unusual diseases," "house construction," "evaluating locations for mining," and "towing trucks." "I'm very busy," said Zhang. He had been hired to choose today's burial site.
The family members took turns prostrating themselves before the tomb. Nobody seemed to mind that I was watching. First the men kowtowed, burning paper money and moaning softly. In a whisper I asked Zhang if the ancient signal tower had any influence on the tomb's feng shui, or geomancy--the relationship with the surrounding landscape, a traditional Chinese concept that determines fortune. In the past the Communists had banned feng shui as old-fashioned superstition. But over the past 20 years, as the economy has opened up, the old belief has been revitalized--and repackaged to fit business cards.
"The position of that tower is very important," Zhang said. "You see, this place is good because it's high, and there's water in that stream to the east. And you have the signal tower above, which serves to protect the tomb." Then he slipped into official feng shui jargon, jotting the words into my notebook: "A person buried in this location will have many wealthy descendants, who will rise to high civil, military, and scholarly positions."
Now the women kowtowed, their wails echoing across the valley.
"My father and grandfather were both feng shui masters," Zhang said. "We've always done this in my family. And everybody in my family lives for a long time. My father lived to be 95, and my mother was 88 when she died. My grandfather lived to be 99!"
The keening rose another pitch. I wondered if this conversation might be more appropriate at another time, but Zhang kept talking. As far as he was concerned, he had already guided this particular dragon to its end.
"I have three sons and three daughters," he said. "My sons are feng shui masters! And one of my daughters"--he beamed at the thought of security, in this world and the next--"is a nurse!"
THE FUNERALS gave way to ancient forts as I continued toward the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia. Today Inner Mongolia lies within China s territory, but in ancient times this was a border region whose rule was often uncertain. As a result the northern Shanxi landscape is studded with ruined defensive works that are made of tamped earth--hard-packed yellow soil that has faded in the sun. I passed signal towers and walls that stretched for dozens of miles and villages that were entirely contained by high-walled forts. Many of the town names included the characters for "fort," "barracks," and "check, int." Once, these had been garrisons for Chinese soldiers; now they were sleepy villages. The peasants here grew potatoes. They worked steadily under a sunny sky, and the forts seemed out of place, like an ancient fear turned to dirt and left to crumble.
The majority of these defenses dated to the Ming dynasty--the builder of the greatest walls in Chinese history. Most of what we now think of as the Great Wall was built during the Ming, which was the only dynasty to construct long sections in brick and stone. Here in Shanxi, where they had defended against the Mongols, some of the Ming fortifications had been fourfold--quadruple lines of parallel walls.
But long before the Ming and the Mongols there had been other fortifications, other threats. Traditionally, the Chinese classics had taught that eventually all peoples will succumb to the appeal of culture and become civilized. But theory and practice parted company along the northern frontier, where early states often defended against the Hu. The Hu's origin is mysterious; they are thought to have included horse-riding nomadic peoples from Central Asia who were linked by a key characteristic: They showed no interest in assimilating Chinese culture. The name first appeared during the Warring States period (403-221 B.C.), when the nomads initially came south and wall building accelerated, as it did again during the Qin dynasty (221-207 B.C.), the first to unite the empire. The Hu were viciously effective warriors, and their appearance in this part of the world was as sudden and anomalous as these ancient forts seem to a modern motorist who happens to be driving north.
I stopped in Ninglu, the last village in Shanxi before the Inner Mongolian border. The population was 120, and the settlement was surrounded by an ancient garrison wall nearly a mile in circumference. Old people sat in the village square, soaking up the sun.
In Chinese villages I often asked if there was anybody who understood local history, and sometimes the people pointed me to a local sage or an amateur historian. Sources of Chinese history can be humble; official archaeologists and historians are so overworked and underfunded that they often don't have much time for a place like Ninglu. Whenever I spoke to scholars, they emphasized the same thing: Don't underestimate the value of local memory.
The old people in the square answered my question immediately. "Talk to Old Chen," they said.
His name was Chen Zhen, and he was 53 years old. He was a potato farmer--he worked less than two acres of dusty farmland--and he owned five sheep. His annual income was around 200 dollars. He wore heavy black-rimmed glasses, and his silver hair was cropped close to his head. He took me to his home, where he opened a drawer and pulled out a sheaf of rice paper that had been stapled together. On the front cover he had written: The Annals of Ninglu/Research Established January 22, 1992.
I opened the book and read Chen's careful script: "The town wall was built in the 22nd year of the Jiajing Emperor (in 1543), and encased in kiln-fired brick in the first year of the Wanli Emperor (in 1573)."
There were dozens of pages, hundreds of dates. There were sketches and maps. I leafed through the book, wishing there was a photocopy machine within three hours' drive. "I researched the county archives," Old Chen explained, "and then I talked to old people in town who remembered things. Some of them have died since I started. I just finished last year."
He showed me some pottery fragments that he had found near a Han dynasty wall. Three different dynasties had left fortifications in this region, and Old Chen offered to take me out to the ruins. We drove north into the mountains, where he led me into a high valley of scrub grass and dusty gullies. Old Chen had the slow, deliberate walk of the Chinese peasant: hands clasped behind his back, head bowed thoughtfully.
He pointed out the Northern Wei dynasty (A.D. 386-534) wall, a faint two-foot-high ridge running northeast. The Han dynasty (206 B.C.A.D. 220) wall was so small that I wouldn't have noticed it without his help. Running parallel to it was the Ming wall, six feet high and marching eastward across the hills. It was intersected by the road, where a stone tablet, stuck into the heart of the wall, proclaimed Inner Mongolia. The Ming wall still serves a political purpose, marking the border between Shanxi and Inner Mongolia. It also represents an economic divide--because parts of Shanxi have lower land-use fees, peasants in this area told me they prefer to farm the southern side of the wall.
Back at his home, Old Chen pulled out a map and said that the village was originally called Ningxi Hulu. The name translates as: Pacify the Hu.
"Basically it means kill the foreigners," he said with a smile. "Look at this--" He pointed to another village on the map, ten miles to the east: Weilu. Overawe the Hu. Fifteen miles to the west: Pohubu. Destroy the Hu. Another 20 miles beyond that: Shahukou. Slaughter the Hu. Today these villages use the character for "hu" that means "tiger"--a change made during the Qing dynasty, whose Manchu rulers came from northern tribes and were sensitive to the portrayal of people from beyond the border walls.
Old Chen shook my hand when I left. "Next time you come," he said, "try to bring an archaeologist."
I DROVE into Inner Mongolia. These were high, empty steppes, and at twilight I pulled off the road to camp. The night was cold and clear, with massive stars overhead, and the Big Dipper hung heavy in the western sky. I fell asleep thinking about the border towns whose names bristled along these mountains: Pacify the Hu, Destroy the Hu, Slaughter the Hu. At midnight the tent was suddenly bathed in light and I sat bolt upright, thinking that it was the headlights of a truck. Then I realized that the moon had just broken the horizon. I sat still for a moment, listening to the wind and the pounding of my heart.
My trip had not been officially approved, and occasionally I passed through areas that were not open to foreigners. I tried to move quickly when I was in sensitive regions, and I often camped or stayed at truck stops, to avoid registering at a hotel. For this fall trip, I hoped to make it to Shaanxi Province, and then in the spring I would continue to the far western end of the border walls.
People in these areas rarely saw foreigners, and sometimes they asked if I was Mongolian, Tibetan, or Uygur--a Hu, more or less. I often picked up hitchhikers; usually they were going back and forth between rural hometowns and new urban settlements. China's migrant population is estimated to be 150 million, mostly peasants who are searching for work in the cities. Many of my riders were small-town sophisticates--former peasant women who had made the leap to the city and now worked as waitresses or beauty parlor attendants. Their hair was dyed unsubtle shades of red and they entered the car in a cloud of cheap perfume. They sat stiffly, their backs hardly touching the seat, as if riding in a car was a formal experience. Typically they waited ten minutes before asking, politely, "You're not Chinese, are you?"
One morning in rural Inner Mongolia I picked up a young woman and her grandfather. They were both migrants--they shared an apartment in Jingbian, a small city 80 miles away. She was named Wang Yan; the given name means "swallow." She had elegant, small-boned features and almond-shaped eyes the color of coal. A tiny beauty mark had been tattooed upon her forehead. She wore a red silk dress. Her appearance in this barren landscape surprised me as much as if a bird had come and settled in my Jeep.
Her grandfather was slightly deaf. He carried two enormous bags of salt, harvested from the family farm in Inner Mongolia. It occurred to me that the family had probably sent him to live with the young woman so she wouldn't get in trouble in the city.
The moment he entered the car, the old man asked: "Do you know Hah Heliu?"
I shook my head, confused by the question.
"He's from our village!" the old man shouted.
"He's gone to Beijing to work! I was wondering if you've met him yet!"
I told him I'd keep an eye out. Swallow smiled and shook her head.
The old man shouted questions at me while I drove. He asked what Beijing was like, and whether I was Chinese. He asked how much I planned to charge them for the ride. Swallow stared straight ahead and hardly spoke. But one of the few things she said was, "All of the young people leave our village. I'm not going back."
MY FALL JOURNEY ENDED in the Loess Plateau of central northwest China. The plateau covers 300,000 square miles, and in appearance it is one of the least hospitable landscapes in China--dry yellow mountains, craggy gullies. Centuries ago these hills were forested, but generations of farmers and years of drought have left the land as bare as a beach. Because the region represents the last northern stretch of arable soil in a crowded country, it's still heavily farmed; since 1949 the population of the Loess Plateau has more than doubled. Farmers rely on extensive terracing to coax crops from the earth, which is rock-hard when dry but falls apart when wet. Rainfall is rare--around ten inches annually--but even this small amount of water is enough to tear through the fragile land, taking the topsoil with it. Over time, tiny creeks create immense canyons. People live in caves that pockmark the crumbling hillsides.
I always noticed the propaganda more in these empty landscapes. Whenever natural features like trees and ground cover disappear in China, words take their place, often carved straight into the earth. Sometimes their prescriptions were obviously impossible; I drove past brown barren hillsides that had been tattooed with 50-foot-high words: "Make the Green Mountain Even Greener." But there was something mesmerizing about driving past a mountain that said "Marry Late and Have Children Late."
In Shanxi Province's Youyu County, I passed a section of the border wall where four massive towers had been converted into propaganda. Each structure had been whitewashed with a single 40-foot-high character. Together they read: "Protect Water Solidify Earth."
I realized that the words and the walls were a perfect match. Chinese walls also have a tendency to fill empty landscapes, and, like the slogans, the defense structures' inspiration had usually been more philosophical than practical. Over the course of Chinese history there was often an inverse relationship between pragmatism and wall building. The Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-907), one of the most powerful in Chinese history, never built long walls. The Tang ruling family had some Turkic blood, and they were skilled at interacting with Central Asian tribes through a combination of war and diplomacy. But centuries later the Ming refused to adopt either of the two time-trusted methods of dealing with nomads: the Ming were too weak to drive out their neighbors, and too proud to offer trade or subsidies to people they considered barbarians. Instead of choosing one approach, the court bickered for decades, finally building walls out of a failure to commit to either war or peace. The Jiajing Emperor, frustrated by Mongol raids during his rule from 1522 to 1567, decreed that the character for barbarian, yi, should be written as small as possible on official documents. The Ming fortifications were born of the same impulse: more a message than a tactic. They scrolled across the northern emptiness, telling a long tale of human stubbornness and indecision.
The four towers--Protect Water Solidify Earth--led up to an ancient garrison fort. The tamped-earth structure stood at the summit of a massive mountain, overlooking a half-dozen valleys where the loess soil had been carved into a riot of stunningly intricate patterns. Terraced fields descended hillsides like curling staircases. In some places there were galaxies of tiny squares, each of them two feet across and a few inches deep, designed to contain and protect thousands of saplings that had yet to be planted. The fort's wall had been whitewashed with another message: Use the World Bank's Opportunity Wisely/Help the Mountainous Area Escape from Poverty.
I drove to the Youyu County water bureau, where an official accompanied me on a tour of the area. Along with other parts of the Loess Plateau, this region was home to one of the World Bank's most widely praised Chinese projects. The official told me how the development organization's loans were being used to encourage the planting of trees, solidify terraces, and prevent erosion. He introduced me to Han Jixiang, the Communist Party secretary of Xiaojiang, a village of 400. "In the past, whenever it rained, everything washed away," Han told me. "The roads just disappeared. It's so much better now." His comments echoed what I had heard in the past from other visitors to the Loess Plateau--in this difficult landscape, the World Bank has had success battling poverty and deforestation.
I drove away, dazzled by the reformed loess landscape. Signs of work were everywhere along the road, and I stopped again to look at the fort's propaganda. That dazzled me as well--this structure, once built to keep foreigners out, was now touting the benefits of international aid.
Near the tower that said "Water," I passed a work crew of ten peasants. They were using shovels to carve squares into the hillside--tiny dirt forts for future saplings. I asked the peasants what they thought about the project.
"They've been doing this kind of thing since I was young," a 28-year-old man said. "In the past it wasn't the World Bank, but there have been other campaigns. You see all of these holes? They're empty. For two or three generations people have been digging holes and you still don't see any trees here. Why not? Because our labor is free, but they'd have to pay for the trees. The local officials embezzle the money instead."
The other peasants told me that in recent years the population of their home village, Dingjiayao, had dropped from 200 to 80. They said that much of their topsoil had been removed and carted to roadside plantings, which were important for inspections. These saplingless squares served the same purpose--despite the World Bank's success elsewhere in the north, this particular village was creating a Potemkin hillside.
"We see the World Bank officials in their cars when they have inspections, but we can't talk to them," the young peasant said. "The county leaders don't let us. Actually, I don't even know what `World Bank' means. All I know is that it has something to do with investment. They just tell us slogans: Protect the Land, Turn the Land into Forest."
He asked me not to use his name, but he wanted the name of his village published--like many people in rural China, he still had faith that higher levels of the government would rectify local wrongs. While we were talking, a tiny tractor puttered up the hill. The driver handed each of the workers five packages of instant noodles--their pay for the day's digging. The peasants ate the noodles dry, because the only water on this hillside was the word painted on the ancient tower. I noticed that the packages said "Islamic Beef Noodles."
"Are you Islamic?" I asked.
"No," grinned the peasant. "But these are the cheapest brand--no pork. A nickel each!"
IN SPRING I set Out to finish the journey. This time I hoped to reach Gansu Province, home to the westernmost ruins of Han and Ming dynasty forts. Again I started in Beijing, but this time I followed a northern route, intending to pass quickly through Inner Mongolia. On the map it looked simple--but I never imagined that it was possible for a traffic jam to materialize on the barren steppes of Inner Mongolia.
A sudden storm had blown south from Siberia, and the temperature plummeted. Fuel lines froze solid--enormous blue Liberation trucks stopped dead in their tracks on Highway 110. Most of the other vehicles on the two-lane road were black Volkswagen Santanas. They had been better designed for the cold, but black Volkswagen Santanas have a psychological weakness: impatience. They wouldn't wait for the truckers to maneuver their vehicles off the road; each Santana kept nudging ahead as far as possible, pinning the car in front, getting pinned in turn from behind, until at last the highway was gridlocked for a mile. Meanwhile the truckers clambered down beneath their rigs, where they ignited flares and held them hopefully against the frozen fuel lines. Nearby, a highway safety sign proclaimed: This Road Has Had 65 Crashes and 31 Fatalities.
I arrived just as the tableau was complete: the snow-swept steppe, the frozen vehicles, the flares glowing in the distance like joss sticks. Or fuses.
The scene wavered between the dangerous and the surreal--a common condition for Chinese motorists. Once, near a Ming wall outside of Beijing, I met an 82-year-old woman with bound feet who had never made the two-hour trip to the capital. "I get car sick," she said, when I asked why she had never traveled, and over time I came to appreciate her simple wisdom. During my journeys, the vehicle got stuck repeatedly in snow, sand, and mud. Car sick. Locals yanked me out and gave directions. Roads were mixed--occasionally there was a perfect stretch of new asphalt, but often it only lasted for a few miles before fading into potholes. Everything seemed to be half-built. Maps were unreliable. A couple of times I drove on roads that deteriorated into dried creekbeds. Another time I passed an automobile, smashed almost beyond recognition, that was suspended on stilts fifteen feet above the road. It promoted highway safety; on the door somebody had painted: "Four People Died Inside." Car sick. Outside of Baotou, a city in Inner Mongolia, I paused to marvel at the wreckage of an enormous truck that had somehow wedged itself sideways into a tollbooth, like a Chinese puzzle: a carved pagoda within a jade egg.
The crumbling walls were never far away, a companion piece to the halfway stage of Chinas rush to progress. In Ningxia Autonomous Region I passed through Xingwuying, a desert village whose residents only received good cell phone coverage if they climbed the local Ming dynasty fort. They stood atop the faded ramparts, dialing furiously, gazing into the distance as if searching for invaders. In these regions the motorcyclists fixed compact discs to their mud flaps as makeshift reflectors. High-tech intersected with the ancient, as if modernity had arrived with the suddenness of an invasion--what does it mean when smoke signals are replaced by cell phones, but you still have to climb the wall to use them? In Xingwuying, the ancient wall was now an accessory: attached to cell phones, it fortified reception.
The country swept past. There was movement everywhere, but the symphony of migration also had antiphonal strains of settling down. The descendants of the Hu were coming to rest. In Uxin Qi, a small Inner Mongolian town just on the outside of the Ming border wall, the ethnic Mongols had shifted to a settled life of farming and herding. Government programs had planted willow trees across the Mu Us Desert; the leaves could be harvested in autumn and fed to the sheep. Locals called it "the pasture in the sky." I visited Mongols who had grown up in felt tents; now they had brick homes, televisions, and video compact disc players. They told me life was better than ever before. On their mantels the peasants erected small shrines to both Mao Zedong and Genghis Khan.
But when I stopped at the Genghis Khan Mausoleum, 70 miles away near Ejin Horo Qi, a young tourist pulled me aside and said that there are still more Mongols in China than in independent Mongolia. "We're a fallen race," she said. "We don't have a united country, and yet at one time we were the greatest race in the world. Have you noticed that Mongols drink a lot?"
Certainly I had noticed that her breath sang of grain alcohol. And I had noticed that virtually everybody else at the Genghis Khan Mausoleum seemed to be drinking as well. Guides, tourists, ticket-takers--all of them staggered under a bright blue sky. Some of the more sober mausoleum employees told me bluntly that Genghis Khan's remains weren't really here. Most historians say he was buried. The Chinese claim that his tomb is in Xinjiang; Mongolians claim that it's north of Ulan Bator. The controversy has raged for years, and yet the only tangible monument is the mausoleum outside Ejin Horo Qi--nothing more than a symbol and a tourist destination. The young woman asked me where I was from, and then she smiled wistfully. "The Great America," she said. "It's like Genghis Khan used to be."
AFTER INNER MONGOLIA I crossed the Tengger Desert--an emptiness of graceful dunes and golden sand. I followed the Yellow River westward into Gansu Province and then turned north. In ancient times, Gansu had been the western hinterland, and the old fortifications were heavy here. Miles of earth wall ran alongside Highway 312.
At Jiayuguan I met Yang Yongfu, who was rebuilding part of a Ming dynasty wall. It wasn't the first time I'd seen old-style walls under construction--along the North Korean border in Liaoning Province, I once visited a site where the local government was erecting a massive 1.3-mile-long stretch of brick and stone.
There is something appropriate about the fact that even today the Chinese are still building--and finding--the Great Wall. Its significance has never stopped developing--in a sense, it has come a long way since the Ming dynasty collapsed in 1644. The next dynasty, the Qing, viewed the walls as a reflection of the Ming's failure to defend borders through diplomacy and military power, and the fortifications were left to deteriorate.
But starting in the 1600s, Europeans who visited China began to return home with exaggerated reports about the walls. Many falsely believed that all sections dated to a single period, giving rise to a popular misconception that the entire structure was built during the Qin dynasty. Travelers saw the impressive Ming fortifications near Beijing and assumed that they continued in brick and stone all the way across China, when in fact most of the structures had been built of tamped earth. In the first decade of the 20th century, Western writers declared, with absolutely no evidence, that the Great Wall could be seen from the moon. The length was often exaggerated. While experts say that the Ming fortifications are roughly 1,700 miles long, there is no accurate figure for the length of China's border walls, because so many parts haven't been surveyed.
Even the term Great Wall--used to describe a structure with almost mythic characteristics--was originally a foreign phrase. The old Chinese wording changcheng was understood simply to mean a "long wall," and the great Ming walls were called bianqiang--border walls. But by the early 20th century some Chinese started using the phrase Wanli Changcheng (literally "10,000 li long wall") to render the Western concept of a Great Wall of China.
Leading Chinese scholars criticized this trend as historically inaccurate. "Chinese geographers lamented the loss of the original concept," said Arthur Waldron, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. "They used it as an example of how terminology can become profoundly misleading and misunderstood."
But Chinese nationalists realized the symbolic value of a unified Great Wall. Both Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong used the Wall to represent the nation, and in 1984 Deng Xiaoping commanded that patriotic Chinese should restore the structure. His proclamation became a well-known slogan: "Let us love our China, let us restore our Great Wall." Over the past century, even as the walls have grown in symbolic significance, they have steadily deteriorated, victims of new roads and buildings. Last year a foreign organization applied its own phrase to the structure: The World Monuments Fund, based in New York, added the Great Wall to its list of "most endangered sites." William Lindesay, a British preservationist who lives in Beijing, has campaigned to save what he calls the "wild wall"--untouched fortifications in rugged natural settings.
Tourist development represents another risk. At Jiayuguan, Yang Yongfu told me that he had put his own spin on Deng's phrase. "I like to say, `Love my China, I'll rebuild the Great Wall,'" Yang said. "In the past the government restored and protected it. But now I'm the one investing here."
Yang claims to be the first Chinese businessman to gain permission to rebuild a section of the border walls for his own profit. He is 40 years old, a former peasant who in the late 1980s oversaw the government-funded reconstruction of another local wall section. Yang applied that experience, and an investment of over $120,000, to his current stretch of wall, which runs through the desert near the Black Mountains. The surrounding hillsides are riddled with cement-lined bunkers built in the 1960s to defend against possible attack by the Soviet Union. Today the bunkers are abandoned and open to tourists.
When I visited, Yang's workers had already built more than a quarter-mile of tamped-earth walls, burying the original low structure. Tourist admission to the wall would cost 75 cents. Down the road, the government-run section was charging a dollar. Yang said that it wouldn't be hard to turn a profit. After everything I'd seen the ancient walls used for--feng shui, propaganda, cell phone coverage--Yang's defense of pragmatism made perfect sense. Nearly 400 years after the fall of the Ming, the Great Wall had finally become useful.
"It's not enough to simply protect something," Yang told me. "You have to actually use it. If it's not valued, then sooner or later it will get destroyed."
THE FINAL LINE of Han dynasty forts is in the desert west of Jiayuguan. I was on my way there, passing through the small town of Subei, when I finally got caught. I had pulled over to use a public toilet. A policeman approached and flashed his badge, telling me that Subei was closed to foreigners, which I hadn't realized. It looked the same as every other place I had passed through that week--snow-topped mountains, open grasslands. I had driven exactly 4,956 miles.
Subei was in an ethnic Mongolian county, and two Mongol officers escorted me to the police station. I assumed the Jeep would be seized; there would be a massive fine; expulsion was inevitable. The region must have been closed because of military installations, ethnic tensions, or poverty--things the Chinese don't want outsiders to see.
Waiting for the interrogation, I wondered if the police might respect the fact that a foreigner had driven alone along the border walls. But I doubted that they would understand my journey. The fortifications had been built to keep people like me out, but now it was clear that the walls' most powerful characteristic wasn't exclusion but rather a sense of narrative. The Great Wall told a natural story, crossing both the landscape and the history of China, and that intersection of time and place touched at the roots of a civilization. And I had come within a few miles of finishing the story.
The interrogation began. Where was my passport and driver's license? What was my Beijing address? How long had I lived in China? What was my work unit?
They jotted my responses onto official forms. They worked quickly, leafing through dozens of pages, and suddenly I realized that there wasn't any real investigation. There were no phone calls to Beijing, no contact with the foreign ministry. They didn't really care who I was, or why I was in Subei, or where I planned to go next. My threat was purely abstract--the troubling part about foreigners was the idea, not the reality. It was something to be handled with paperwork.
They prepared a confession that said I had violated the national laws regarding closed districts. I signed it three times, accompanying each signature with a fingerprint in red ink. Then they announced the fine: twelve dollars.
I wasn't allowed to pay directly--nobody wanted to be accused of corruption--so they escorted me down the street to the local post office, where I mailed a money order. The officers smiled, shook my hand, and left me standing next to my Jeep. As far as they were concerned, the foreigner was already gone.
I kept driving on Highway 215, heading toward the mountains of Qinghai Province. The final Han dynasty fort slipped past; the Great Wall was behind me now. A sign proclaimed: Due to Speeding, 53 People Have Died on This Turn. The highway rose to over 12,000 feet, and I crossed into the vastness of Qinghai. There were no towns, no gas stations, no cars. The land was so empty that nobody had bothered to carve propaganda into the mountains. It looked like the end of the world.
After 25 miles I saw a pair of dirt roads branching off the main highway, marked by a sign. From the words on it, I guessed that the two destinations were government-run--military installations, perhaps. A left turn led to a place called "Build." A right turn went to "Unite." I took a deep breath and drove straight through.
REMAKING WALLS--AND LIVES
Lofty plans take shape along the Yalu River as workers rebuild a 1.3-mile section of wall (left). Beyond the river lies North Korea, source of today's trespassers: those hoping to escape a despotic regime and reach South Korea by seeking asylum in foreign embassies. Descendants of earlier arrivals, Kazakhs in Gansu Province recite Muslim prayers before feasting on lamb and horse at a memorial service (below). Many of the nomadic Kazakhs now live in apartments but use traditional yurts for ceremonies.
RAMPARTS FOR THE AGES
WRITING LIKE DRAGON TAILS, THE GREAT WALL IS NOT ONE STRUCTURE BUT MANY.
Some border walls are said to date from the seventh century B.C., but most of what we call the Great Wall was built during Ming dynasty. Its effectiveness was spotty: Some invaders merely made end runs. But wall-top paths did help Chinese defenders move soldiers and equipment.
A fence protects a section of Han dynasty wall near the Jade Gate Pass to the Silk Road (above left). Using historically authentic methods, workers tamp earth at Jiayuguan to rebuild a stretch of Ming wall (second from left). Near Tianjin, workers fire bricks for wall construction (third from left). The precipitous stone-and-brick Simatai section of thee wall (far right) includes such whimsically named sections as the Fairy Tower and Heavenly Ladder. The total length of the walls is unknown, though the sections built by the Ming alone would stretch from Washington, D.C., to Wichita, Kansas (inset).
THE FAR REACHES
A red tide of peppers floods the sere plain of Ningxia, where the wall scales mountains beyond. Wu Zhanmin hauls his "sheep horn" peppers from Inner Mongolia. "They take a month to dry--even more if it rains."
At the Ming wall's western end near Jiayuguan (left), sightseers perch atop a defensive tower. Such attention is relatively new; after construction ended in the 1600s, the wall was largely neglected. Only in the 20th century did the Great Wall become a symbol of national pride.
RITES OF PASSAGE
Veiled in red--China's most auspicious color--newlywed Zhu Birong is spirited from her home by her groom, Liu Yongchun, to his family's house following their marriage in the walled village of Deshengbu.
More in celebration than sorrow, a funeral at the Qingciyao coal mine honors the passing of an 80-year-old woman. Following a common practice at funerals, players in an itinerant folk opera troupe dance, sing arias, and perform comedy skits on the back of their truck.
NEW WALLS FOR THE PEOPLE
Recent massive projects serve commerce, not defense. Apartment blocks in Pinglu stand ready for an influx of migrants seeking work in the mines of Shanxi Province, site of rich coal deposits. In Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China, coal powers the steel mills of Baotou (right), a city of more than two million residents, 170,000 of whom work in steel production. Among the area's largest cities, Baotou was a fur-trading center in the 19th century during the Qing dynasty.
HITTING THE WALL
Runners in the Great Wall Marathon confront China's version of the Boston Marathon's Heartbreak Hill 80 miles northeast of Beijing. "No one ran up those steps," says photographer Mike Yamashita. "They walked." The runners he met called it the toughest stretch they'd ever encountered anywhere.
Less arduous pursuits can be found at Badaling Safari Park. For amusement, customers pay $3.60 to toss a live chicken to hungry lions. For a sheep the price jumps to $36.
DENG XIAOPING'S PROCLAMATION BECAME A WELL-KNOWN SLOGAN: "LET US LOVE OUR CHINA, LET US RESTORE OUR GREAT WALL."
Drowned by progress, a section of wall in the east vanished in a reservoir when the Luan River was dammed in the 1970s. With the Great Wall becoming a moneymaker, authorities strive to ensure that it never again disappears from public awareness.
WEBSITE EXCLUSIVE
Video Views: Travel the Great Wall with photographer Mike Yamashita. Check out behind-the-scenes tales, a photo gallery, and links at nationalgeo graphic.com/ngm/0301.
COPYRIGHT 2003 National Geographic Society.