The Great Wall of China, which stretches for 21,000 kilometers in northern China, is one of the most famous human inventions in the world. In 2007 it was named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, along with the Taj Mahal and the Colosseum in Rome.It was included by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on the World Heritage List in 1987.When tourists visit Beijing, they flock to the most famous parts of the Great Wall, but few of them visit the lesser known part of it.A section of the wall, known as Jiankou, extends for 20 kilometers on steep green mountaintops. And if you look at it from the valley, it will look like the garlands that adorn the top of every mountain.
This part of the wall is located 100 kilometers from Beijing, but it is completely different from the neighboring parts of the wall. In the vicinity of Jiankou Wall, there is no sign of a gift shop or hanging carts, and no one stands to sell tickets. In order to reach this part of the wall, you have to walk for 45 minutes up the mountain.
The Jiankou part of the wall has not undergone any restoration or repair until recently. For centuries, this part of the wall, which was built in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, was untouched by human hands. This part was worn out, especially for a distance of seven kilometers, and the majestic towers were transformed with the passage of time into mounds of ruins.
Parts of the wall collapsed completely, and the sections that were wide of the wall were barely enough for only one person to pass. The trees made their way across the wall of the wall, making it appear closer to the forest than to the fortress.
But this part of the wall, despite its danger, is distinguished by its pristine natural landscape. "One or two people die every year on this part of the wall. Some of them fall down while walking, some of them are struck by lightning," says Ma Yao, director of the Great Wall Protection Project at the Tencent Foundation, which funded the recent restoration.
To prevent further disasters, and to preserve the wall for future generations, restoration work began in 2015. I sat with Yao on the fence, near the completion of the project, and the fortress peaks stretched in front of us in sight. "Machines can't get here, so the workers did all the work without using machines," Yao says. "But we used some new devices and technologies to help them finish the necessary work perfectly."In 2019, drones, 3D mapping technology and engineers' computer algorithms were used to figure out whether it was better to remove trees from the bridge or leave them where they are.
Yao says these techniques helped them restore the wall using traditional methods.The Great Wall occupies a vast area in northern China, from Manchuria to the Gobi Desert and then the Yellow Sea. The wall bears a long history, as it was built more than two thousand years ago, in the period between the third century BC to the seventeenth century AD, during the reign of 16 ruling dynasties.
The longest and most famous section of the wall, including the Jiankou section, was built by the Ming Dynasty from 1368 to 1644. A survey conducted by the National Cultural Heritage Administration of China revealed that the Ming Wall stretches for 8,851 kilometers, and includes trenches for 359 kilometers and 25,000 guard towers.
Today, a third of the original forts built during the Ming era have disappeared, with only eight percent remaining in good condition. The fence faces many threats, from natural erosion, such as wind and rain, to human activities, such as construction work and even the theft and sale of bricks from the fence, not to mention the damage caused by the large numbers of visitors walking back and forth on the fence.
"Within 20 million people live within a stone's throw, a footfall could damage the fence," says historian and environmental advocate William Lindsay, referring to Beijing. Lindsay devoted his life to researching, writing books on the wall, and fighting to protect it.
Lindsay, who hails from England, has seen the fence on the map since he was a boy in 1967, and decided to explore it. In 1987, three years after visiting Hadrian's Wall in Scotland made him relive his childhood passion, Lindsay was walking on the Great Wall of China.
Lindsay was the first tourist to walk the Ming Wall from beginning to end. "It wasn't a quiet walk as it seemed, the police stopped me nine times, or rather they arrested me. I was charged with repeated trespassing and deported me home. Then I went back to Hong Kong and was able to go back to China. The political adventure turned into an emotional one, and I proposed to a girl three times."
Not only did Lindsay fall in love with this girl, with whom he celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, but he also fell in love with Jiankou Sur, a gray fortress in the green mountains that cut through the trees for his daughters.
He moved with his family near Jiankou Wall in 1997, and coined the term "wild wall", to describe the difference between the restored portions of the Great Wall that attract tourists, and the unrestored portion. He says that this unpaved part, which extends over a distance of thousands of kilometers, is the largest open-air museum in the world.
Lindsay's library is filled with pictures of his long walks, and the shelves are littered with books, many of them written by him. He showed me some of the treasures he had accumulated over the years, such as a sixteenth-century boulder hollowed out in the middle to hold gunpowder, and a bow that archers used to shoot arrows from the top of the wall in the early years of its construction.
Since he moved there 20 years ago, the fence has gradually worn out, deteriorated, staircases have eroded, towers have collapsed, and climbing has become dangerous.
Lindsay says that preventing people from climbing the Great Wall of China is almost impossible, and that is why the government had to start restoring the wall to preserve the safety of visitors.
A visitor to the fence passes through a fruit orchard and then a forest, and signs are spread on the road calling on visitors to preserve the fence, such as "Chinese cultural heritage belongs to the world, and everyone bears the responsibility to protect the fence," and "You only take pictures, and leave only your footprints."
I climbed the wall four times, but I encountered only two visitors once, and they insisted on taking a picture with me, as these parts of the wall are seldom visited by American tourists.
The scaffolding that had been laid to restore the wall appeared on the horizon. The final phase of the project is expected to be completed after several months.
But restoring the wall may interfere with efforts to preserve it. If an antiquity is over-restored, as happened with the Badlaying, the most popular part of the wall, the antiquity may lose its flavor and character. In the fifties of the last century, new blocks and modern cement were used to rebuild this part of the wall. Today, a large part of it covers graffiti and graffiti.
She watched a group of mules near the scaffolding carrying huge sacks of white ash. One of the workers began mixing the ashes to form a thick mortar, as workers do not use modern concrete to restore the walls. Others spread mortar over the bricks and carefully placed them in the middle of the wall.
When I climbed the part that was undergoing restoration, I found it quite different from what it was before, as there were only a few trees left in it among the bricks, and one of its parts was so steep that no one could walk in it without ropes.
Zhao Ping, chief designer of the restoration project, pointed out the repairs carried out in the wall, the most important of which was changing the direction of rainwater flow to keep it from being eroded by water. The team put in holes and channels to drain the water and used new, thicker blocks in the parts where water might collect, so that the water did not penetrate these blocks.
Ping says the team has been making minimal repairs to the fence. The team carried out careful inspections of the fence, recorded the flaws and cracks, and then made plans to repair them, taking into account the preservation of the fence.
The team is assisted by engineer Shang Jinyu, from the Peking University School of Archeology, in the capital, Beijing, as his team uses a drone that takes 800 pictures in half a day of the part undergoing restoration. The team then uses these images to build a 3D model of the fence that includes every brick and crack in the walls.
This data helped the design team restore the fence with minimal intervention. Ping says that one of the cracks could not be checked manually because it was in one of the towers. The photographs taken by the drones helped us determine the size of the crack, the degree of inclination of the fence, and the extent of its stability.
Zhao says that this data records the steps of each stage of the restoration. He gives an example of this in the process of restoring one of the towers, whose roof was covered with trees. The team had to remove the building blocks in order to uproot these trees.
Thanks to modern techniques, the team was able to precisely return the building blocks to their place, by creating simulated models of the original building block positions. Now, after restoration, Zhao says, the tower still retains its historical appearance.
Technology giant Intel has prepared a 3D simulation model of the fence, based on 10,000 images taken by its drone. Intel submitted its model to the China National Foundation for Cultural Preservation, which participated in the fence restoration project.
The design and restoration teams are now using these modern technologies to carry out the restoration work of another part of the wall with an area of 900 meters, and part of it is under water.
And in the middle of the day, I saw huge ants and bees the size of a thumb, for everything here seemed like a fence, big in size. The workers fell asleep after a long day's work, and started walking up the mountain since dawn. Although advanced technologies helped the design team, it does not replace manual labor with hammers and chisels.
There was silence, broken only by the sound of four climbers, who warned me not to proceed towards one of the sections of the fence, as it was very steep, after part of it had fallen.
It is clear that no one cares about the white banners that read in Mandarin "Tourists are not allowed", as the fence has not yet been officially opened to the public. But these signs will disappear with the completion of the restoration process, and this calm will also disappear, and people will not be afraid to approach the "wild" fence.
The wall may now be less dangerous after repairs, but it still reminds us of the past centuries that not only delineated forts but helped shape China itself. The Jiankou Wall, after its restoration, still has its wild features.
The Jiankou part of the wall has not undergone any restoration or repair until recently. For centuries, this part of the wall, which was built in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, was untouched by human hands. This part was worn out, especially for a distance of seven kilometers, and the majestic towers were transformed with the passage of time into mounds of ruins.
Parts of the wall collapsed completely, and the sections that were wide of the wall were barely enough for only one person to pass. The trees made their way across the wall of the wall, making it appear closer to the forest than to the fortress.
But this part of the wall, despite its danger, is distinguished by its pristine natural landscape. "One or two people die every year on this part of the wall. Some of them fall down while walking, some of them are struck by lightning," says Ma Yao, director of the Great Wall Protection Project at the Tencent Foundation, which funded the recent restoration.
To prevent further disasters, and to preserve the wall for future generations, restoration work began in 2015. I sat with Yao on the fence, near the completion of the project, and the fortress peaks stretched in front of us in sight. "Machines can't get here, so the workers did all the work without using machines," Yao says. "But we used some new devices and technologies to help them finish the necessary work perfectly."
In 2019, drones, 3D mapping technology and engineers' computer algorithms were used to figure out whether it was better to remove trees from the bridge or leave them where they are.
Yao says these techniques helped them restore the wall using traditional methods.
The Great Wall occupies a vast area in northern China, from Manchuria to the Gobi Desert and then the Yellow Sea. The wall bears a long history, as it was built more than two thousand years ago, in the period between the third century BC to the seventeenth century AD, during the reign of 16 ruling dynasties.
The longest and most famous section of the wall, including the Jiankou section, was built by the Ming Dynasty from 1368 to 1644. A survey conducted by the National Cultural Heritage Administration of China revealed that the Ming Wall stretches for 8,851 kilometers, and includes trenches for 359 kilometers and 25,000 guard towers.
Today, a third of the original forts built during the Ming era have disappeared, with only eight percent remaining in good condition. The fence faces many threats, from natural erosion, such as wind and rain, to human activities, such as construction work and even the theft and sale of bricks from the fence, not to mention the damage caused by the large numbers of visitors walking back and forth on the fence.
"Within 20 million people live within a stone's throw, a footfall could damage the fence," says historian and environmental advocate William Lindsay, referring to Beijing. Lindsay devoted his life to researching, writing books on the wall, and fighting to protect it.
Lindsay, who hails from England, has seen the fence on the map since he was a boy in 1967, and decided to explore it. In 1987, three years after visiting Hadrian's Wall in Scotland made him relive his childhood passion, Lindsay was walking on the Great Wall of China.
Lindsay was the first tourist to walk the Ming Wall from beginning to end. "It wasn't a quiet walk as it seemed, the police stopped me nine times, or rather they arrested me. I was charged with repeated trespassing and deported me home. Then I went back to Hong Kong and was able to go back to China. The political adventure turned into an emotional one, and I proposed to a girl three times."
Not only did Lindsay fall in love with this girl, with whom he celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, but he also fell in love with Jiankou Sur, a gray fortress in the green mountains that cut through the trees for his daughters.
He moved with his family near Jiankou Wall in 1997, and coined the term "wild wall", to describe the difference between the restored portions of the Great Wall that attract tourists, and the unrestored portion. He says that this unpaved part, which extends over a distance of thousands of kilometers, is the largest open-air museum in the world.
Lindsay's library is filled with pictures of his long walks, and the shelves are littered with books, many of them written by him. He showed me some of the treasures he had accumulated over the years, such as a sixteenth-century boulder hollowed out in the middle to hold gunpowder, and a bow that archers used to shoot arrows from the top of the wall in the early years of its construction.
Since he moved there 20 years ago, the fence has gradually worn out, deteriorated, staircases have eroded, towers have collapsed, and climbing has become dangerous.
Lindsay says that preventing people from climbing the Great Wall of China is almost impossible, and that is why the government had to start restoring the wall to preserve the safety of visitors.
A visitor to the fence passes through a fruit orchard and then a forest, and signs are spread on the road calling on visitors to preserve the fence, such as "Chinese cultural heritage belongs to the world, and everyone bears the responsibility to protect the fence," and "You only take pictures, and leave only your footprints."
I climbed the wall four times, but I encountered only two visitors once, and they insisted on taking a picture with me, as these parts of the wall are seldom visited by American tourists.
The scaffolding that had been laid to restore the wall appeared on the horizon. The final phase of the project is expected to be completed after several months.
But restoring the wall may interfere with efforts to preserve it. If an antiquity is over-restored, as happened with the Badlaying, the most popular part of the wall, the antiquity may lose its flavor and character. In the fifties of the last century, new blocks and modern cement were used to rebuild this part of the wall. Today, a large part of it covers graffiti and graffiti.
She watched a group of mules near the scaffolding carrying huge sacks of white ash. One of the workers began mixing the ashes to form a thick mortar, as workers do not use modern concrete to restore the walls. Others spread mortar over the bricks and carefully placed them in the middle of the wall.
When I climbed the part that was undergoing restoration, I found it quite different from what it was before, as there were only a few trees left in it among the bricks, and one of its parts was so steep that no one could walk in it without ropes.
Zhao Ping, chief designer of the restoration project, pointed out the repairs carried out in the wall, the most important of which was changing the direction of rainwater flow to keep it from being eroded by water. The team put in holes and channels to drain the water and used new, thicker blocks in the parts where water might collect, so that the water did not penetrate these blocks.
Ping says the team has been making minimal repairs to the fence. The team carried out careful inspections of the fence, recorded the flaws and cracks, and then made plans to repair them, taking into account the preservation of the fence.
The team is assisted by engineer Shang Jinyu, from the Peking University School of Archeology, in the capital, Beijing, as his team uses a drone that takes 800 pictures in half a day of the part undergoing restoration. The team then uses these images to build a 3D model of the fence that includes every brick and crack in the walls.
This data helped the design team restore the fence with minimal intervention. Ping says that one of the cracks could not be checked manually because it was in one of the towers. The photographs taken by the drones helped us determine the size of the crack, the degree of inclination of the fence, and the extent of its stability.
Zhao says that this data records the steps of each stage of the restoration. He gives an example of this in the process of restoring one of the towers, whose roof was covered with trees. The team had to remove the building blocks in order to uproot these trees.
Thanks to modern techniques, the team was able to precisely return the building blocks to their place, by creating simulated models of the original building block positions. Now, after restoration, Zhao says, the tower still retains its historical appearance.
Technology giant Intel has prepared a 3D simulation model of the fence, based on 10,000 images taken by its drone. Intel submitted its model to the China National Foundation for Cultural Preservation, which participated in the fence restoration project.
The design and restoration teams are now using these modern technologies to carry out the restoration work of another part of the wall with an area of 900 meters, and part of it is under water.
And in the middle of the day, I saw huge ants and bees the size of a thumb, for everything here seemed like a fence, big in size. The workers fell asleep after a long day's work, and started walking up the mountain since dawn. Although advanced technologies helped the design team, it does not replace manual labor with hammers and chisels.
There was silence, broken only by the sound of four climbers, who warned me not to proceed towards one of the sections of the fence, as it was very steep, after part of it had fallen.
It is clear that no one cares about the white banners that read in Mandarin "Tourists are not allowed", as the fence has not yet been officially opened to the public. But these signs will disappear with the completion of the restoration process, and this calm will also disappear, and people will not be afraid to approach the "wild" fence.
The wall may now be less dangerous after repairs, but it still reminds us of the past centuries that not only delineated forts but helped shape China itself. The Jiankou Wall, after its restoration, still has its wild features.
