The 21,000 km long Great Wall (Wall of China) located in the north of China is the most famous creation of humanity. It is among the Seven Wonders of the World, including the Taj Mahal and Collegium, the largest theater of the ancient Romans. The Great Wall of China was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1987.
When tourists from all over the world arrive in Beijing, they fill up the buses and head to various important places on the Great Wall of China. Some of the tourists also visit this part of the Great Wall known as ‘Jian Kao’.
The ‘Jian Kao’ section of the Great Wall stretches over a 20 km long area like a jagged line over the green hills. From the valley below it looks like an ornamental letter on each mountain peak.
It is located 100 kilometers north of Beijing. But it is quite different from its better-known neighbors, Badaling and Mutianyu.
There is no souvenir shop in the area, nor the famous coffee shop Starbucks, nor a cable car. There will be no one selling tickets for the tour of this place, nor a tour guide leading to this part of the wall.
To reach this part of the Great Wall, you have to climb the mountain for 45 minutes.
And until recently there was work going on to improve the condition of this wall. This part of the wall, built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, did not receive much attention for centuries.
The seven kilometer long wall attached to this section had become very dilapidated. Due to the passage of time, many of its minarets have turned into piles and ruins of bricks and stones, while parts of the wall have collapsed in such a way that only a person can walk on the remaining wall.
Trees and bushes had grown in such a way that this wall began to look like a forest instead of a wall. Although the view was beautiful, this ancient wall had become very dangerous.
“Every year, one or two tourists would fall to their death while walking on this section of the Great Wall,” says Ma Yao, project manager of the Tennessee Charity Foundation, which has undertaken the restoration of this section of the Great Wall. Some people even fell and died while hiking. And some were killed by lightning.
He said that technology helped us to restore the traditional condition of this wall as much as possible.
Restoration work began in 2015 to prevent further accidents and to prevent further deterioration of the Jiankou section of the wall. The grueling work, which spanned 750 km of the wall, was completed in 2019.
As the project was nearing completion, on a bright spring day I had the opportunity to sit down with Ma to discuss the work on the wall.
Walls surrounded us as far as we could see. “You can see these mountains here,” Ma told me. Heavy machinery cannot be brought here. We had to deal with humans here. But we should use technology to do this job better than humans.
In 2019, the technology used on the project included three-dimensional mapping of the terrain and a computer algorithm that told engineers where to repair a crack through a tree. Excavate or simply fill the crack or leave the area safely untouched to indicate that wild vegetation once grew on these walls.
“Technology helped us to restore the traditional state of the wall as much as possible,” Ma said.
The Great Wall of China stretches like a snake from the northern region of China to the Gobi Desert to the Yellow Sea. Its history is equally great. It took two thousand years to build, from the 3rd century BC to the 17th century AD, and was built by sixteen different royal families.
The longest and most famous part of the wall was built during the Ming dynasty, who built (or rebuilt) the wall between 1368 and 1644, in which Jian Kao Part is included.
According to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and State Bureau of Survey and Mapping, a government archeology agency, the Ming wall is 8,851 km long, including 6,259 km long wall and 359 long trenches, 2,232 km long natural barriers and 25,000 defensive towers. It was built during the time of the royal family.
In this construction, not only a wall was built from one point to another point B, but it also included stairs, double walls, parallel walls and wall arches.
Today, one-third of the Ming Dynasty wall has been destroyed. Only eight percent of this has been properly preserved so far. The threats are manifold, natural erosion by winds and rains, destruction of these walls due to human construction in nearby areas, and sale of bricks here, and of course landslides. to slip This is especially true for Jian Kao, which even today has the least number of tourists in the area, such as Badaling.
William Linsey, a historian and environmentalist, points to the city of Beijing and says, “There are two million people living at the foot of these mountains.” Therefore, the advice to leave nothing but footprints at its foot may actually damage this wall.
Linsey has spent his entire life researching and writing to preserve the wall.
Linsey, from England, saw this wall on a map in 1967 when he was a student, and decided to research it. In 1987, three years after running on Hadrian’s Wall, the ancient Roman-era wall in Britain, his childhood curiosity was rekindled and he hiked the foothills of the Great Wall of China.
He was the first foreigner to walk the Ming Dynasty Wall from start to finish. He did the same trip again in 2016 on a jeep. He told me that it was not such a beautiful sight anymore. I was stopped by the police nine times, you could call it detention, then repeatedly accused of crossing the border and deported.’
Then I went to Hong Kong from there (after that I came back). For me it was a physical campaign, a political campaign and besides I proposed to the same girl three times, so it was also a romantic campaign.
I asked, ‘Then what happened to him?’
He laughed and said, “Very good.” We celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary a few days ago.
He also fell in love with Jian Kao’s wall, which was a green wall (the Great Wall of China) quite different from the black wall (Hadrian’s Wall), with trees growing out of the bricks.
He moved to the foothills of Jiankou with his family in 1997 and coined the term ‘wild wall’ to describe the contrast between a place like Jiankau and the built wall of the Badaling region. With thousands of kilometers of this type of area, it can be called the world’s largest open-air museum.
Linsey’s library wall is dotted with pictures of his long walks. There are bookcases everywhere in the wall, many of them written by him.
He showed me the treasure he had collected there over the years. A 16th-century stone bomb, with a hole for gunpowder, was a replica of a glittering bow used in those days to shoot arrows through a wall.
In the more than twenty years since he moved to this region, he has seen Jian Cao’s part of the wall. He said that at first I thought this part was safe, but now it is not. Where the foundations of the wall looked strong, now there are pits. The towers have started collapsing, now even climbing the wall has become difficult.
“You can’t make the Great Wall off-limits,” says Linsey. This is a very difficult task. So I think the government has no choice but to rebuild it and make it safe and stabilize it.”
He stopped talking and then said, ‘I love this wild wall, but when the number of tourists exceeds a certain limit, then the work goes bad. Then a tragedy is born.
The footpath leading to the wall leads through a garden, then a forest. Along the way there are many places that require protection. “Chinese civilization is a world heritage and it is everyone’s responsibility to protect the Great Wall,” said a tourist.
“Take pictures here and nothing else, take everything back here except the footprints,” said another. I hiked up and back every day for four days and only once did I see other hikers in the forest, two women I had heard a lot about before I saw them.’
One of them was singing a folk song. When they saw me, they insisted on taking a selfie with me. These areas do not see many American tourists.
On reaching the summit, before the wall is visible, reconstruction work is visible. Right in front of me there was a scaffolding for repairs. After several months, the final phase of the project was nearing completion.
“The wall is a cultural treasure and a heritage for all of us,” says Zhao Peng, head of the project to secure it. “We are not only willing to repair it and make it safe, but we really want to make it safe and that is a responsibility.”
But repairing the wall can also make it unsafe. If a place is reconstructed again and again, it does not remain the same as the original form. Many say this appears to be the end of Badaling, the most famous part of the wall.
During its reconstruction work, which began in 1950, new bricks were laid and cemented together with modern cement.
They have various writings written in many places which spoil its beauty. It has also been derided as ‘Disneyfication’, ‘Disneyfication’ being the re-imagining of something from the past in modern times.
An attempt has been made to avoid this error in the reconstruction of Jian Kao’s section.
Now I could see a group of mules waiting near the scaffolding. They also reached here by the same route by which I came. Bags of white lime were loaded on these mules and brought here.
One of the workers was mixing this white lime with white soap. Modern type of concrete was not to be used in this project.
The rest of the workers were applying this spice on the bricks with a towel. They were putting these bricks into the wall very carefully. The area where the work was being done was 750 meters wide.
It happened right in front of me. Some trees also grew in these bricks. The wild path leading to Jian Kao was quite different from what it had been before. But still the wild style was preserved in this reconstruction.
When I hiked this mountain trail, it had steep vertical climbs in many places and it was very slippery and it was so steep that I walked as stiff as a crab despite the professional hiking boots I had on. So that I don’t fall anywhere.
At another place, one side of the wall had completely collapsed. And at the end of it the wall stopped.
And it turned into a narrow path that steepened the mountain in such a way that you could not climb the vertical slope without the help of a rope and survive.
Minimal intervention does not mean no intervention.
Zhao pointed to several works that interfered with the historic architecture of the wall to preserve it.
Despite concerns about landslides at the foot of the Linsey mountain, the main cause of erosion in the Jiankou section wall was water runoff.
Securing the wall in the long term means changing the flow path of rainwater. The team created holes and channels to divert the flow of water in it so that the water could drain without damaging it.
However, in areas where water was likely to accumulate, they used new bricks that were very solid and perfectly straight so that the water would not absorb into them and flow straight away.
The new bricks looked distinctly different from the old bricks, in a sense a way of telling future generations what the difference was between the original wall and its reconstruction.
“We have a principle, the principle of least intervention,” says Zhao. But minimal intervention does not mean no intervention at all.
One way to minimize disruption to the project was to use advanced technology.
Zhao explained this by saying that usually designers will do a thorough and comprehensive inspection of the wall, not its weaknesses.
But in his studio he will work on how to work within his limitations to future-proof his wall.
This time he was using a new thing. Shang Jinyu, an engineer at the Peking School of Archeology and Museology in Beijing, took me along to explain the process.
His team flew a drone over this section of the wall and took around 800 different images in half a day.
Using these images, they created a three-dimensional (3D) model of the wall down to each brick and each crack. To get a complete picture of his recovery, they repeated the process through the middle and end stages.
“We have created three-dimensional and panoramic images of many heritage sites in China,” says Shang Jinyu. But this is the first project in which we have used this system to restore a cultural heritage.
The data from the three-dimensional images helped the engineers figure out how to restore the wall with minimal intervention.
An example is the crack on its towers. “It was impossible to see this crack normally,” says Zhao. By flying the drone, taking pictures and then digitizing the data, we were able to estimate the size of a crack it caused, and how much the wall was leaning. And then we would decide how to stabilize the wall.
This data also provides a record of each stage of the wall’s restoration work. “The real purpose of the 3D images is to keep inspecting the repair process,” says Ma.
An example of this is towers. Most of the roofs were hidden by trees and bushes. Trees were uprooted to protect the towers. In removing these trees, the engineers also had to remove bricks.
In the past it was a very difficult task to put the bricks back in their original place without any mistakes after removal. Now they can easily know the exact location of a brick.
“They repaired the roofs of the tower, but they still look like a building that has been standing for thousands of years as it was,” says Ma.
Interestingly, the Peking University team was not alone in this idea. The computer and technology giant ‘Intel’ had done a three-dimensional modeling of its surface. His drone took 10,000 pictures and gave them to China’s cultural preservation agency, which is itself involved in restoration projects of such ancient buildings.
Both projects were essentially about the same idea. Their data was not initially included and when it was, not as much as could have been included.
So far, these teams have given the team of engineers working on the construction enough information on how this technology can help them in the future with minimal intervention.
Now these teams are taking this knowledge to the next level, the restoration of another part of the wall. “This is Zifeng Kao, 300 kilometers from Jiankao,” says Ma. This part consists of a 900 meter long wall. And part of it is under water.
“Like Jian Kao, we will use a three-dimensional modeling approach, and based on the repair experience at Jian Kao and the modeling, the team modified it to optimize the new restoration projects.”
It was my lunch time on the last day at Jian Kao Wall. Ugly ants were marching among the stones. A soft little bee, about the size of a thumb, passed us. It seemed that everything in this place was as big as this wall.
The workers used to rest in the shade of these towers of the wall. His day started with a long climb up the mountain in the morning. Modeling with the help of three-dimensional images may have helped them, but it did not replace the hard work done with their hammer and chisel.
The silence of the atmosphere was broken by the lyrics of these two women’s folk songs. These women wore a cloth from their body to their eyes to avoid sun damage.
“Don’t go away from here,” she told me, “it’s a very deep vertical space.” She was pointing to a nearby section.
A part of the site had collapsed causing a deep crater. If you are not a mountain climber like the worker here, there is another way to go which is dusty.
No tourist there seemed to understand the instructions on the two boards which said in meandering language that ‘Tourists are not allowed to enter.’
Technically, the wall has not been formally opened to the general public.
However, no one can explain these decrees as to what they mean. Or that other tourist signs about the tourist walking routes.
The end of the restoration work is likely to break the current silence. And maybe the ‘Tourists are prohibited’ board will be removed.
The fear of this wild wall will be reduced. Not only the fearless but more and more common people will come here.
This wall will no longer look abandoned and dangerous as before. But this wall is a magnificent monument to the centuries-old history of fortifications not only in China but around the world. And in its soul, if a wall can have a soul, there is a whisper of wildlife.
