‘All armies prefer high ground to low.”
So wrote Sun Tzu in The Art of War, and as the sun slips beneath the rugged hills north of Beijing I can see why. After nearly two hours of rigorous uphill hiking, I'm stretched out on a mat with two friends on the overgrown roof of a crumbling Ming dynasty watchtower – our home for the night – trying to imagine a passing Mongol army. We sip a tall can each of Stella Artois and admire the darkened silhouettes of the surrounding hills. We count nine watchtowers on their peaks.
There's a light breeze and thunderclouds loom. An almost eerie calm. Village lights are scattered in the valley below, but there's no sign of Beijing and its 17 million inhabitants. On this hill, on this stretch of the wall, there's just the three of us.
As night falls on the Great Wall of China, a thought creeps into my head: The life of a watchman must have been seriously lonely.
This, in fact, is the isolation we've come for. We're at a section of wall called Gubeikou, about two hours north of Beijing, where we plan to camp for the night and hike to three more watchtowers in the morning. With me are Carey Nourse, 32, and Dave Young, 41, Canadian teachers at an international school who have lived in Beijing for six and three years respectively. Each has put camping on the Great Wall on his to-do list before bidding farewell to the Chinese capital.
We've come in part to find a personal connection to what is sometimes called the world's largest museum, a feat of human ingenuity built over 2,000 years and covering more than 6,700 kilometres of varying terrain from the Yellow Sea to the deserts of western China. It was guarded by more than one million men, and several million people are thought to have died building it.
Unfortunately, the most popular areas – Badaling, Simitai and Mutianyu – are often overrun with tourists and hawkers. The wall kept out Barbarian hordes, but was futile against Chinese kitsch. Some sections include zip lines, slides and gondolas, and in recent years the wall has played host to wine tastings, fashion shows and raves. These restored sections have been reconstructed with little care for historical accuracy.
Hiking and camping on the Wild Wall – the unrestored sections, often overgrown and in ruins – is the best way to experience the wall's true majesty. There are over 600 kilometres of wall north of Beijing, and much more in neighbouring Hebei province, and it's remarkably easy to find a section to yourself. In fact, the wall's mysteries are still being revealed: A 290-kilometre section was recently discovered during a two-year mapping study.
Although the Beijing municipality enacted regulations in 2003 to dissuade people from walking on portions of the wall not designated as tourist areas, the rules are vague and scarcely enforced, and Hebei province has none. Dozens of tour companies offer multiday hiking and camping trips on the wall.
We meet on a Friday afternoon in the outskirts of Beijing and begin the two-hour drive to Gubeikou in Dave's small hatchback. We've got our packs, sleeping bags and mats, and enough food and water to make it through the night and the next day. The section of wall where we plan to stay is on a ranch belonging to Lohao City, a chain of organic grocery stores. The ranch caters to day trippers, and tomorrow we'll be fed a multicourse organic lunch after our hike.
Upon arrival (and after getting hopelessly lost on the back roads outside Beijing), we're greeted by Mr. Li, a ranch hand who gives us just two instructions: “Don't smoke. Don't make a fire.”
Done and done.
