What you should know about visiting China’s Great Wall

11.11.2024 - 13:55 / lonelyplanet.com

Nov 8, 2024 • 8 min read

Cloaked in legend and mystique, the Great Wall of China crosses mountains, grasslands and desert on its tireless course across what used to be China’s northern frontier.

A border defense system garrisoned by hundreds of thousands of soldiers at various times in China’s turbulent history, the Great Wall today is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is in a state of picturesque yet precarious ruin, a fading relic with only a tiny fraction of its total length restored and open to tourists. 

The Wall has loomed large in the world’s imagination since travelers first brought tales of it to the West around the 16th century. Even today, this remarkable monument to human endeavor remains a misunderstood marvel. In fact, it’s not one Wall but a great many border defense structures built centuries apart, which, when taken together, present an architectural record of the ebb and flow of conflict between the settled Chinese and the fierce nomadic tribes beyond the Wall, such as the Xiongnu (descendants of the Huns) and the Mongols.

The total length, including every branch, tributary and intervening natural feature, has been calculated at a staggering 13,170 miles. From Shanghai Pass to the remote regions of Gansu province and inner Mongolia, the wall spans 15 Chinese provinces.

From east to west, the Wall stretches across 23 degrees of longitude. When the sun sets on the Wall’s eastern tip near the Korean border, it takes almost two hours until it dips behind its far-western reaches along the old Silk Road into Central Asia.

During the Ming Dynasty, almost a million troops were garrisoned on the Wall (roughly 110 soldiers per km), living in the watchtowers and moving rapidly between them when necessary to repel an invasion. The Ming’s great enemy, the Mongols, were formidable horse-mounted soldiers and archers, and so the Chinese depended on the Great Wall to mount an effective defense. As well as being an elevated highway for transporting troops, horses and equipment, it also had a beacon-tower system, using smoke signals generated by burning wolf dung to transmit news of enemy movements back to the capital, Beijing. Weapons used by defenders were surprisingly advanced for the time, and included automatic crossbows, canons, and an early type of landmine.

But despite the Ming’s mastery of wall defense, the Manchu found a way through (walls are only as reliable as their gatekeepers), conquered Beijing and established the Qing, China’s last imperial dynasty (1644–1912). Although the Qing had some use for the Ming walls, and added a few of their own, the greatest era of wall building in the history of mankind had come to an end, and the battlements were eventually abandoned, their unmanned bricks and