A Great Wall That Defines China

BADALING, China — Standing atop this mountain precipice, shivering in the cold, I gaze across the near-frozen expanse and wonder: What really kept Genghis Khan and his northern invaders from overrunning the Middle Kingdom — this towering Great Wall or this Gruesome Weather?

On a late-November morning gale-force winds send the temperature plunging, stinging exposed skin, at times making it difficult to stand in place. But here at the wall’s nearest tourist access to populous Beijing, the crowds scurry along the uneven stone steps, taking selfies, as happy as children at Disneyland.

Families wave red Chinese flags and run their hands along the ancient masonry. They’re proud of this 2,700-year-old signature national landmark, known as Changcheng, that draws 10 million visitors a year.

For many, the wall provides the spinal cord of China’s historical backbone. It is one of the world’s seven wonders, celebrated for its mystery and marvel engineering. Thousands of miles long, undulating across 15 different regions, it represents both China’s unification and its global isolationism, a testimony of history and strength, a contiguous city built in the wilds.

It’s not just a military barricade but its own crenellated art form, as exquisite as an ivory chess piece. It is China’s own beloved American Route 66, carving a huge swath amid the still-desolate countryside.

I have been visiting this wall for decades and still have the sweatshirt I bought during my first trip here in 1995. My most meaningful encounter came when I hiked a far-off stretch of the wall with an American scholar whose imagination was captured by the sheer size and scope of the project.

Along the way, I’ve learned a few things about the ancient bulwark, both fact and fantasy. First of all, the wall cannot be seen from the moon but on a good day, you can spot it from the international space station. The mortared slabs of stone that comprise the barricade do not hold the bones of some of the countless workers who died during its construction but their skeletons no doubt litter the surrounding landscape.

The truth behind the wall is far more fascinating than the fiction.

David Spindler stood along a fortified crown of China’s wondrous Great Wall and gestured toward a river valley that snaked away northward into the gloom.

“Over there, he said, his voice lilting in a sense of discovery. “That’s the direction from which the Mongols attacked.”

For two hours on Oct. 23, 1554, a bloody battle raged at this spot. The raiders used ropes to reach the Chinese defenders, climbing the wall “like ants,” Spindler explained. He told of a Chinese soldier who hacked off the hand of an attacker only to be killed moments later, his head pierced by an enemy arrow.

Mongol forces had tried to gain purchase at several points before finally attacking here. But the Great Wall did its job. The battle lasted a mere two hours, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., as the Chinese soldiers repelled the invaders with arrows, crude canons, clubs and even rocks.

“Without this wall,” Spindler said with a sweep of his hand, “northern China would have been an indefensible no man’s land.”

I’d heard about Spindler in 2008. He was a physically impressive man, elongated and sturdy, like the wall that inspired him. At 6-foot-seven, the 41-year-old had become an almost accidental scholar of one of China’s most beloved icons, a Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School graduate who left behind a lucrative job to pursue his grand obsession thousand of miles from his Massachusetts roots.

Without academic affiliation or funding, he’d at that point spent 14 years traveling across China and Japan to review arcane, centuries-old texts for first-hand details. He’d also endured some 1,000 days bushwhacking over the wall’s farthest-flung ramparts, wearing out several pairs of hiking boots, his body scratched and bleeding, excursions he called “hiking like a Mongol.”

Along the way, he had pieced together the amazing history of a stunning human accomplishment.

The first stones of what would become the Great Wall were laid in 676 BC, the beginning of a series of overlapping mini fortresses built by feudal dynasties to protect against the nomads and plunderers who swept in from the north. It was not contiguous and suffered numerous sizable gaps.

In 221 BC, China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang, ordered that the fragments be connected. Building the wall became an obsession. 

Work crews invented the wheelbarrow to move materials to the project, using whatever resources available in their region. By the 12th century, they had reinforced the original soil, wood, fieldstones and quarried rock with bricks and tiles, mixing lime mortar with sticky rice pulp to better hold the whole thing together. 

They added combat modifications such as watch towers, garrison stations, weapons turrets  and troop barracks, all as a way to protect burgeoning Silk Road economic trade routes. The wall also facilitated battle line communications: If one section was under attack, soldiers lit torch fires often fueled by wolf dung, beacons that passed signals along a line of watch towers to call for reinforcements.

Today, large swaths of the wall are deteriorating from erosion and are threatening to crumble entirely. Still, hardy hikers, both Chinese and foreigners alike, embark on months-long expeditions to walk its entire length, much like Americans do the Appalachian trail.

Over the centuries, the Great Wall has been memorialized in poems and the Chinese national anthem. During the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao once said: “If you do not reach the Great Wall, you are not a good man.”

David Spindler is a good man, many times over. 

Over the years, he spent countless hours in Chinese Internet chat rooms, his spoken and written Mandarin perfect, trading minutiae with both serious and amateur wall enthusiasts — never letting on that he was an American.

That’s where he met Hong Feng, a Peking University policeman and fellow wall researcher. Spindler used a Chinese nickname and Hong assumed he was a local student. “He was always persistent and well-trained,” Hong told me at the time. “He always asked for evidence for everything.”

Then came the day Spindler decided to reveal himself, calling Hong to arrange a dinner. The policeman recalled seeing the towering Spindler loping toward him, not so much amazed by his height, but his nationality.

His first words: “I didn’t think you were a foreigner.”

For years, Spindler survived mostly off his savings and occasional consulting work. While his former Harvard law classmates made partner at prestigious firms back in America, he scaled down his already monk-like Beijing lifestyle to a bare minimum — taking buses and subways, cooking his own meals, living in a succession of tiny threadbare apartments.

He rejected grant money due to his lack of an academic research pedigree, but eventually began speaking to travel groups on Great Wall history. Many listeners were Americans who, once they heard about Spindler’s vaunted education, considered him a towering Don Quixote chasing a Chinese windmill.

Part of the appeal of Spindler’s Great Wall research, it turned out, was being outdoors. The work allowed him to savor a sensation unfamiliar to many residents of the world’s most-populous nation: isolation.

He hiked for days without seeing another soul, explored abandoned villages, gotten lost, watched other hikers break arms and legs in falls — all while tracing the roots and origins of the meandering fortification.

Sometimes, high in the mountains, he paused from his work to take a deep breath and appreciate the beauty of the moment. “I see new things all the time,” he told me. “This is a wonderful workplace.”

On the day of our meeting, Spindler and I took a midday romp over an isolated section of wall not far from Beijing. I struggled to keep up with his loping stride. At some point, it was time to leave behind all this talk about a fierce battle fought along the wall 500 years before.

When I asked Spindler for the time, it appeared that he was still stuck in 1554.

“Twelve-fifty,” he said, consulting his watch. “The battle’s over by now.”

I have always taken the Great Wall a bit less seriously than David Spindler.

In 1991, when I took my parents there for a visit, my father and I rode in the back of a van en route from Beijing, and he asked about the name of the place we were going. 

“It’s called Badaling,” I said, “But if you’d prefer, there are two entry points for Italians just up the road — Badabing and Badaboom.” (weak drum roll).

In the 1950s, the Chinese government refurbished several miles of the wall closest to Beijing as a tourist attraction. On this recent November day, I join a few thousand enthusiasts to try our hand at scaling the steps that in places seem to rise at impossible angles, making many visitors to pause to catch their breath, always harassed by the unforgiving wind.

The vistas are fantastic, the walking arduous but it’s somehow less of an experience without a guide like David Spindler to put it all into perspective. 

And so I huff and puff past several turrets and then call it a day, in the end diminished by this Great Wall.

No doubt like so many Mongols.