A view of China's Great Wall. Photograph © Dallas and John Heaton/CORBIS

Great Wall
By William Lindesay

Ordinarily I might have paused to catch my breath, but hiking up to the Great Wall of China is never an ordinary affair. Its silhouetted battlements running along the skyline spur me on. Sweating, straining, I'm injected with new enthusiasm when I spot bricks from the wall lying at the side of the rocky path, weighing perhaps 30 pounds each. I press on, doubtless in the footsteps of the army of builders who carried and levered the wall up—brick by brick, block by block—from 1,200 feet below. Then, instead of getting lighter as expected, the horizon darkens: A 20-foot-high barrier of light gray stone confronts me, its massive blocks laid in straight courses, perfectly interlocking. More than 2,000 pounds each, I estimate, and nine courses high. Insurmountable. An archway gives me the only access into this stronghold, and I climb steps onto the top of the wall, a stone highway stretching into the distance. From here I get a view down to the valley, my route, the builders' route. I wonder how the builders transported all the material, for I'm atop a 2,600-foot-highridge, a formidable thing. Then nature paints over that logistical enigma with a pale pink sunlight, which illuminates a scene virtually unchanged for 430 years. My map-reading has been good: I am on a section of the "wild wall," where nothing modern deforms the vista, not a power line or a road; there is only this ancient road of sorts, the Great Wall of China.

Quarried and baked from the mountains and earth that it crosses, rising along the line where traditional Chinese ways of life clashed against the free, roving ways of northern nomads, the Great Wall here complements nature, even enhances it. Before and behind me the glowing ramparts dominate the landscape for miles around. I know by the symbol on my map that the wall comes from where the sun rises and goes to where it sets.

I am standing all alone, high up on the Great Wall, with the whole day before me to walk along my very own section of the world's most spectacular open-air museum. I need no other vantage point to know the wall's true greatness: It is far more than history, far more than a landmark—it is part of the very geography of China, of Asia, of the world, and even beyond.

The information in this story was accurate at the time it was published, but we suggest you confirm all details before making travel plans.