Today we visited the Great Wall of China. We took a 2 hour bus ride from Beijing to the foot of one of the parts of the wall which is open to the public. We took a chairlift up to the wall (because we’re lazy) and then decided to climb the steepest part of the section of wall (because we didn’t think it would be as steep as it actually was) and took a toboggan ride back down from the wall (because we’re EXTREEEME, at least until we got stuck behind the definitely not extreme really slow person about half way down!)
The wall itself is massive. It’s about 12 metres high and 6000 miles long (of course we only saw a small section of it) and was built over 2000 years ago by emperor Chin and was renovatedand extended during the Ming dynasty about 600 years ago. The bit we were on is only 600 years old (apart for the bits that were built in the 80’s while it was being restored). At the very end (at the top of so many steps…) it met up with some of the mega old wall which hadn’t been restored. That looked very old and overgrown.
The wall was built to keep out the barbarians in the north (so it’s a bit like Hadrian’s wall max) in this case the people to the north were the Mongolians (known as the Huns at the time) who ruled in China for a long time after the wall was built so I guess it didn’t work.
Apparently the original (Chin dynasty) part of the wall took 1 million people 20 years to build and at that time the population of China was only 5 million so it has to be the biggest failure ever! Though our guide seems to think that they wanted to stay is just an example of how awesome China is!
Mongolia is our next stop so I’m looking forward to hearing how they did it…
P.S. Sorry if the numbers are incorrect. The population of Shanghai seems to vary from 16m to 27m depending on who you ask so you might need to look it up and apply the same error margins! Maybe someone should comment with the real one?
Leave a Reply