“I want to be a warrior when I grow up!” exclaimed Asher at the top of the Great Wall.
It was a misty, overcast day when we traveled about an hour and a half outside of Beijing to visit the Great Wall at Mutianyu, the longest fully-restored section of the Great Wall that people can visit.
The Great Wall began around 220 BC when the Emperor Qin Shi Huang (the same emperor who built the Terracotta Warriors) joined together earlier fortifications to build the Great Wall to protect against invasions from the North. Construction on the Great Wall continued by Emperors up until the 17th century and extended up to 20,000 kilometers (about 12,430 miles) from east to west in China! It is the only man-made structure big enough to be seen from the Moon!
The Mutianyu section of the wall began in 550, but was expanded on, fortified, and rebuilt up until 1568 under various Emperors.
We started our Great Wall adventure with a cable car ride up to Tower 14.
Then we climbed up some steep granite steps to the top of the wall.
Once we were up on the wall, we turned left (west) to walk the wall, climb more steps, and explore the watch towers. The amazing thing was that there were only about 2 or 3 other groups of people in front of us.
Asher loved pretending he was a warrior shooting down at the invading army!
The Mutianyu section of the Great Wall is about 22 kilometers long, 8 meters (26 feet) high, and about 5 meters (16 feet) wide. There are 23 watch towers spread about a kilometer apart.
Asher, in particular, loved climbing up the stairs (and sometimes ladders) to the top of the watchtowers.
From inside the towers, there were amazing views of the North side of the wall, the other watch towers, and the invading troops (some on brooms!)
The walls of the Great Wall were made of two layers of bricks mortared together. Sometimes there was even a space in between the layers, usually filled in with dirt.
One of the things that amazed me was the huge number of stairs on the wall. Think of those poor warriors who had to run up and down all those stairs in the dark guarding the wall!
There were stairs in the middle of the wall
stairs up to the towers,
And over 450 stairs along the wall to get to the top of Tower 20, which was the furthest we climbed.
But the view from the top was incredible!
Of course, with all that climbing and thousands of years of dust, there was bound to be an injury. Fortunately, we were luckier than many of the people who worked on the wall (the Great Wall is also called “the longest cemetery on earth” in Chinese since over 1 million people died building it). Asher had some of the dust from the wall get into his eye, which we had to wash out.
Once the dust was all washed out and Asher had stopped throwing all the chalk he found on top of the wall over the other side at the approaching invisible Hans, we managed to get a few good pix of the kids
and the three of us
before we climbed down
and rode the cable car to the bottom to go off to lunch. Check out what Subway is serving (Subway Eat Fresh, Eat Peking Noodles!) This was at the bottom of the Great Wall where the cable car drops off. We ate at a different restaurant, but I couldn’t resist taking this photo.
And that was our spectacular morning at the Great Wall, which was Asher’s favorite in our whole tour of China!
