About one month ago, Mandi and I visited the Great Wall of China about 75 miles north of Beijing and spent an entire afternoon hiking a nine kilometer length. While I had visited the wall once before, this was Mandi's first time to actually walk on the wall, and we chose what has to be one of if not the most spectacular part of the entire 4,000 miles. 

The Great Wall has various sections that are open to tourists and hiking, the most commonly visited being the Badaling and Mutianyu sections near Beijing. Previously, Adam and I had gone to the Mutianyu section, which was really amazing and totally upended my conception of the wall. Mutianyu is in very good or even restored condition for most of its length, however, and overall only had one really steep climb. Since I wanted to see something new and Mandi is apparently part mountain goat, we decided to head to the Jinshanling and Simatai sections of the wall, which are farther away, mostly unrestored (that is, collapsing) and extremely treacherous.

The trip began with a bus ride to a mountain near the center of the Jinshanling area. From there we made the relatively short ascent to the wall and then turned east to hike to Simatai. As you'll see in some of the pictures, the surface of the wall was often in a state of utter disrepair, and the battlements were missing for a lot of its length. After lots of pictures, two bottles of water apiece, a whole host of Europeans and countless thousands of steps, we crossed the river gorge that marked the end of the line. On the bus ride home we watched the entirety of Casablanca on my PSP :) Anyway, a great day and a bunch of pictures to share. If you're ever in China, don't shortchange yourself - for all the hype, the Great Wall really is well worth your time.

The view as we began our walk up to the wall.

Us! And a KAFI shirt makes it to the Great Wall.

Mandi in front of the serrated landscape.

Looking west along the length of the wall.

Looking east - it was uphill nearly all the way to the end of the hike.

Approaching a steep climb, and note the lack of battlements.

Perhaps the steepest part on the day, along with pretty degraded steps.

Behind us after conquering the summit.

Some of the bricks are missing.

The river gorge and end of our hike is behind me - note the wall climbing back up at Simatai.

Very authentic :)

Seeing the wall run straight along the highest ridge of the mountains, I decided that it tends to follow the path of most resistance.

Iowa + Peru = Terraced corn fields of China

The river snaking below us as we dragged ourselves towards the end.

After descending. Zoom this picture and check out the wall running along the top of that ridge.

Not much to say, just thought I should take the opportunity offered by the good weather to share a corresponding night shot from our window, facing south over Beijing. The daytime shot is in the Sept. 12th post. Sorry, my photography skills are lacking! Wish Adam or somebody were here to do it justice.

Some pictures from the Temple of Heaven, which Mandi and I visited a few weeks ago. The temple is located in south central Beijing, and is filled with people doing all sorts of fun things - playing games, dancing, Tai Ji, etc. Historically, it is the place that the emperors would visit to pray for good harvests.

Water calligraphy on the grounds, very cool to watch.

Looking south towards the main gate. A smoggy day but not even close to the worst.

The beautiful ceilings. Per my post below, I'm very glad they chose to repaint these as they were intended to be viewed.

Mandi in front of the temple.

Some Tai Ji practitioners towards the north end of the temple grounds. It was a lovely morning even through the pollution.

Authenticity is an issue that I run into frequently here in China. For one thing, China is certainly known the world over for its fakes - fake DVDs, fake name-brand clothes and so on. Even the recent tainted milk issues were based on the idea of producing "fake" milk - that is, using filler to trick quality control and get the poisoned milk onto shelves. But authenticity operates in a lot of ways in a place changing as fast and with as long a history as China.

For instance, many of you are familiar with the hutongs or traditional style of housing in Beijing - four or more families arranged around a courtyard, each courtyard opening through an arch onto the alleyway or street. These dwellings have been rapidly demolished, especially in the run up to the Olympic Games this year. Two years ago I travelled through a Beijing in which entire blocks were marked with "chai," the Chinese character for "demolish." This year I haven't seen a single "chai," but I have seen plenty of widened avenues and newly built commercial complexes named after the hutongs that previously stood in their place. Is the Beijing I see today less authentic than that which existed two or twenty years ago?

Another example is that of the traditional tourist sights and their restorations. The Forbidden City has been totally repainted in the last couple years to look like it was built yesterday. Large sections of the Great Wall have been totally rebuilt since their destruction, which sometimes was as recent as the Cultural Revolution. Tourists can walk along a Great Wall that is only twenty years old. Are these things diminished by their newness?

In most cases I don't think they are. The Temple of Heaven has been rebuilt something like thirty times over the past six centuries - wooden construction lends itself to frequent fire / rebuilding cycles. Each time, that place remained the place where Emperors offered sacrifices for the harvest. Today the thirty-oddth Temple stands as a center of Beijing tourism, Beijing history and Beijing's civic life as a park space used daily by thousands of residents and visitors. Similarly with the Great Wall and Forbidden City - the particular wood or bricks aren't as important as the form and location.

The hutong situation is definitely more difficult, partly because other cities have done a much better job of preserving their ancient core while still modernizing. Xi'an and Luoyang are two cities in China that managed to entirely preserve or at least reconstruct the old city walls and gates, with the areas insides reflecting the traditional architecture, dwellings etc. while the high rises go up outside. Given their success, Beijing has certainly failed - but I have trouble declaring this inauthentic. Beijing is the capital and a symbol of where China is and is going, and while I mourn the fact that so much history has been wiped out, the Beijing that exists right now is as authentically turn of the century urban China as anyplace else.

Anyway, these are just a few of the thoughts bouncing around my mind as I visit the sights and live day to day in a place with 3,500 years of recorded history.

Sorry for the extremely long time without updates. Things have been going along at a good pace here

- class is still very productive, the food is still good and the pollution still fluctuates between

pea soup and clear. I know it's been a long interval, so I'm putting up a few posts that I've had brewing for awhile. First is a pretty standard news post, followed by one on the idea of authenticity in China and later this week another on my visit with Mandi to the Great Wall.

Most recently, I took a two day trip with about sixty IUP students and teachers to Luoyang, an ancient capital of China and today a city of about six million residents located in China's central-eastern region. We took an overnight train for about eleven hours from a third huge train station in Beijing which I didn't know existed until now. We woke up and got off in Luoyang at about 7am - pretty convenient and quite comfortable. From there, we headed first to the White Horse Temple, site of the first Buddhist temple ever established in China. Next was the nominally more exciting Shaolin Temple, world-famous for its Gongfu-practicing (Kung Fu) monks. A neat place but very crowded - we did get to see a bit of a martial arts exhibition but overall the pagoda forest was a more interesting site, with the oldest pagodas dating back to the Yuan and even Tang dynasties (~1000-1400 years old). Some great Korean barbecue rounded out the night, which involves sitting around a table in the middle of which is a pit of hot coals with a grill. You order raw meat and then cook it yourself, which is fun and also extremely delicious. Two plates of lamb, two plates of beef, one of pork and a catfish (they cooked that one) later, I fell into bed at our hotel. 

The next day, we spent the morning at the real treasure of Luoyang - the Longmen Grottoes. Thousands of figures of the Buddha are carved into the rock walls on either side of the river, mostly recessed into caves or niches. Again, these date back about 1,500 years at the oldest and included some really impressive statues along with lots of intricate, smaller carvings. The honeycombed appearence of the rock from across the river was striking. China today has only a small Buddhist population and much of the work has been despoiled by either early twentieth-century Western collectors or rampaging Cultural Revolutionaries, but it's still very much worth visiting.

We came back for a banquet lunch and then spent the rest of the afternoon in a park outside the old city wall of Luoyang. Another IUP student, gifted in music, had brought her violin along and played for us as curious Chinese folks gathered around this outlandish group of foreigners holding their impromptu concert. 

Chinese kid: Are you from China or are you foreigners?

IUP student: What do you think?

Chinese kid: Foreigners.

IUP student: Good! What country do you think we are from?

Chinese kid: Korea?

To be fair he was only about seven :) Anyway, it was a great trip overall and a real relief to flee Beijing just as the pollution started becomign really unbearable, even if Luoyang's sky isn't exactly blue.

More posting soon, I promise.