9/10

The Great Wall

View from the Wall

Gate tower on the Great Wall

The Great Wall

At least the guards in the watchtower at Badaling would have had wonderful scenery to look at. Sadly, it was too foggy for my poor camera but you have to be here anyway. I compromised for my Great Wall experience. I have come to the most touristy part but I did not take a tour. I got up at dawn and walked through the wakening hutong to get to Qianmen subway and then took a bus from Deshengmen. It was very easy and going early meant arriving before the hordes. The Wall is amazing but not so much for its monumental size (it is not particularly high but very long) but because it looks so puny against the mountains it runs through. And the symbolism is fantastic — here China holds back the world. As we know, it didn’t work. The barbarians simply bribed there way in.

As I sit looking out at the Wall, schoolgirls from Nagoya demand a picture with me. I pose with all three. They show me their photo books, a colourful collision of friends, kanji, crayoning and pop stars. I smile at the thought that when I am dust, a Japanese grandma will be showing the grandkids my picture. Who was he, grandma? Igirisu no popstar!

Japanese girls on the Wall

*

A hutong

Behind the broad boulevards lurk the hutong. Turn a corner or two and you are walking down an alleyway four feet wide. Doors open onto courtyards or the back alleys of houses that would long ago have been pulled down in the UK or Australia. This seems a harder, poorer Beijing (although other hutong around the Bell Tower are shady lanes that shout “we are wealthy”, and feature many houses with plaques recording the rich men who have lived there: generals, courtiers, artists, nobility), and I am struck by that curious problem a visitor has. You do not want to look like you have come to gawp, but there you are, come to gawp. I do my explorer stride, walking purposefully (although I have no purpose). I hope to pass as colour rather than an intruder. The locals eye me like so much shit the gods have dumped in their backyard. Somewhere I hear laughter that is not entirely kind, the walls of the fetid back lane seem to be closing in, and I quicken my stride.

Nanxinhua Lu

A posh hutong

A not so posh hutong