Yellow Flower Wall

From Let's Go China:

Built by General Cai Kai, Huanghuacheng took so long to construct that the unfortunate general was deemed inefficient and beheaded. As testament to his tenacity, his headless body stood vigilant without toppling for three days and three nights before the locals had him interred. When the Mongols attacked, Cai Kai's efforts paid off--Huanghuacheng was the only fortress that successfully warded off the enemy. Abashed, the government reburied Cai Kai with honor near the wall.

This past Thursday, a friend backpacking through Asia and I made our way by bus out of the city and out into Hebei province in an attempt to find a remote stretch of the Great Wall to hike. After battling with minibus drivers for a half hour about prices for the 90-km trip there and back, we finally decided on taking a long distance bus from Dongzhimen out towards Hairou, where we would have to either transfer or find a cab to take us on to Huanghuacheng--the "Yellow Lotus Wall."

We stayed on the bus until the very end of the line, which was in fact at a well-known access point to the wall known as Mutianyu. I tried to make myself clear when we stepped on the bus two hours before that we did not want to go to Mutianyu, but instead wanted to go to Huanghuacheng. As many Chinese do when they are trying to be helpful, they hijack your plans or intentions and instead set you on your way going somewhere or doing something that seems to fit into their conception of what you're looking for but misses the point in some fundamental way. My friend and I got off the bus at Mutianyu and, after using the facilities, came back outside and took out a map. The bus driver walked over and pointed uphill, smiling and repeating: "Great Wall! Great Wall! Go!" When I asked where Huanghuacheng was, he looked confused--"The Great Wall is right here," he seemed to be implying. "Why would you want to go somewhere else when it's right here?" Conversing in pidgin Chinese with this extremely friendly, helpful, chain-smoking bus driver was made much more difficult by the swarm of souvenir and food hawkers screaming around me: "Cup of water! Cup of water!" "Wall shirt! Wall shirt! Wall shirt!" "Cup of water!" "Wall shirt!"

I walked down to the parking lot with the driver and he again asked me if I really wanted to go to Huanghuacheng, and I replied in the affirmative. We got back on the bus, and a very friendly girl who spoke English clarified that the driver was going to take us somewhere to get a taxi. We backtracked about a half-hour from Mutianyu until we arrived back in Hairou, where we jumped off the bus and into a cab out to Huanghuacheng.

White paint surrounded the base of the trees lining either side of the winding road leading up through the valley. The paint had a concrete purpose--it was intended to keep termites out of the trees--but as we whizzed by them at frightening speeds one got the impression of that a white picket fence seemed to be lining the road up into the mountains. We passed by miles of barren cornfields, swerving around mules pulling cartloads of dried stalks back towards farms to be either composted or stored for feed. The autumn colors were out in Hebei, and all around us mountains shot up from the valley floor at drastic angles that made their terraced sides appear miraculous.

We were dropped off next to a reservoir near a small parking lot, with perhaps 2 or 3 people milling around selling oranges and bottles of water. A group of three Chinese were getting ready to hit the trail; two had backpacks on, and the third--a young man dressed in a newly-pressed suit--was walking around gingerly, trying not to get too much grit mixed into the black polish on his loafers. I was initially confused, until I remembered what I had heard about the significance of visiting the Great Wall for Chinese. Visiting the Great Wall is akin to a pilgrimage to Mecca for many Chinese--it is something that must be done before you die, and for many you cannot truly be a complete Chinese until you have visited the Wall. We crossed the reservoir and made our way up the hillside together, where you needed to climb up a ladder to access the first turret.

If it wasn't clear why such prestige is conferred on a visit to the Great Wall when we saw it in the distance on the drive up the valley, it all came into focus suddenly upon looking out the windows of the very first turret we climbed into. In the distance to the north, in what was formerly hostile, Mongol territory, rows of jagged stone teeth penetrating the sky above the treeline below formed a drastic contrast with a cobalt-colored background. The oranges, yellows, and reds of the trees still left with leaves all around us looked like specks of color dripped onto a tannish-brown and rocky canvas. To the south, the valley we had passed through on the ride up was abuzz with afternoon activity--mules pulling carts with rows of traffic backed up behind them, crowds of people standing at bus stops, waiting to head back to Hairou for the evening. Many chimneys were starting to billow smoke as wood-fired ovens began to cook dinners in the distance below us. Soon after he had several pictures taken of himself standing atop the wall, the young man in the shiny shoes climbed back down the ladder and strode down the path to the valley below. His pilgrimage was complete.

For about a kilometer we walked along a restored portion of the wall. Despite the even footing and lack of slippage, making our way both up and down 45-degree slopes had us absolutely exhausted after about 20 minutes of continual walking. As we came over the mountaintop, we saw off in the distance the Stone Dragon winding its way up the spine of a mountain twice the size of the one we'd just summited, disappearing into the sky at the topmost point. It was getting late now, and we jumped down off of the wall and onto some footpaths to cut some time off of our trek over to the unrestored part of Huanghuacheng.

Bricks that may have been several hundred or even a thousand years old grew loose as we clambered up the side of the crumbling wall further out. Whereas the stretch closer to the parking lot was smooth and firm with walls forming railings on either side of the walltop, we were now walking on top of a portion that was covered in displaced bricks and rubble. As we made out way further up the mountainside, the drop off of either side went from perhaps 10 or 15 feet up to 50 or 100 feet. At one point during the descent, my left foot did in fact slide a bit off over the side, sending some rocks down into the valley below. A close call.

(Sorry for the sniffling in the video clip above--I didn't realize the camera mic was that sensitive!)

Through turret after turret we continued to ascend as the afternoon darkened. At the highest turret we reached, as my friend was playing with the aperture or the focus on his new camera, I looked out onto the mountains to the north of us and the valley to the south and tried to fully gather the nature of where we were and what we were doing. I had seen pictures of this place since grade school. It was one of the first images that came to my mind and the one that comes to most people's mind if they know anything about China. It was a Wonder of the Ancient (as well as modern) World, and it was literally thousands of years old. I saw people conclude pilgrimages to this place earlier that day. The history combined with the altitude left me dizzy.

We hurried back down the rubble as daylight faded, stopping to eat some oranges, drink some tea, and once to sample some persimmons left by a farmer or another hiker or someone otherwise considerate of those visiting this place. By the time we arrived back at the refurbished portion of the wall where we had a bit more room for error in terms of where our footsteps landed, the sun had set. We climbed back down the ladder and guided ourselves down the hillside using the incredibly-handy flashlight located on the top of my Nokia cellphone (the cheapest yet by far the best cellphone I've ever owned), and when we got to the bottom I asked an old man who apparently rented fishing boats on the shores of the reservoir where we might be able to find some good food and a place to stay for the night. The few sentences of conversation came fairly easy--I guess the Mandarin lessons are paying off. He got on his cellphone and called "Jenny," so he said, who's husband, Mr. Liu, met us with a flashlight at the trailhead.

We walked back along the road to the motel run by Mr. Liu and his family. Smoke wafted from his mouth, at times because he had just taken a drag from a cigarette, and at others simply because the air had now grown so cold up in the hills that we could all see out breath in front of us. He walked us into one room--simple, cheap wood floors, a television in the corner, exposed pipes, with a naked woman printed on a tile on the bathroom wall. His wife came in after a moment and scolded him, it seemed like, for not offering us a better type of room.

We were taken down the row and into another room with an elevated platform bed emanating an incredible amount of heat. I had heard of these heated beds before, and the prospect of settling into one at some point in the next hour or so had me smiling with anticipation. We dropped our bags and headed to the dining room, where Mr. Liu showed me that there was essentially no food to be had, at which point he handed me a menu and told me to order whatever we wanted. He brought over to us as appetizers a plate filled with small, wet, green apples. Apparently the purpose of the water still sitting stagnantly in the plate was to indicate that the apples had in fact previously been washed.

Mr. Liu sat down with us down at table, poured my friend and I a cup of tea, and became insulted after we initially refused a pair of cigarettes he offered us. The green tea (lu cha) tasted particularly good when mixed with a chew on the apple. The several minutes it took Mr. Liu to throw together some vegetable friend rice and sweet and sour chicken allowed us some time to chat for a bit about how indescribably impressive the Wall was. What was even more impressive was how we had managed to find ourselves here, the only inhabitants of a mountainside motel in a small town in Hebei province. It was a far cry from the dormitory that we had woken up in earlier that morning in Beijing, or the houses in the suburbs that we came from before that. It was nice getting out of the city--the air tasted better, and incredibly the people seemed even nicer than they were in Beijing.

The platform bed was so hot that I thought about tossing off the comforter. Aside from a thin mat placed over the platform itself, we slept on what felt like a table. That next morning, my back had never felt better.