Trip to ShangHaiGuan

This section of the great wall was built across a lake.

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My other title is the chief entertainment officer in Beijing office, thus, I was given the job of planning an outing in spring. We finally found the weekend when every one is in Beijing, which is the past weekend.

We took the train to ShangHaiGuan, the direct translation is the Mountain-Sea Passage, which is the eastern starting point of the great wall. The English equivalent should be New Castle suppose mirroring Hadrian’s wall with the great wall.

Along the railway track, we saw lots of soil buns between the farmlands and the track. I was told those are the tombs of the locals. I was so surprised of its simplicity. Each of them looks like the miniature sand dune you can spot near any construction site. If not because it is the season of ancestor tomb visiting season, thus, each of them has some colorful paper stripes under a stone, you can hardly tell it is a tomb. It is also astonishing to observe the number of the soil dune. Oh well, I guess my anthropology study friends should have a lot to write if they were there with me.

Checked into the hotel, we walked around this seaside town. The air quality was definitely better. The great wall divides the small city into half. You can see the section that hasn’t been “renovated”, the 10 meters high walls were built with grey bricks, which were sealed together with sticky rice glue. It is so hard to believe they were like 2000 years old, wow!

I hate the way they renovate historical site, they basically hire the poor farmer and instruct them to chisel away the old bricks so they can put on the brand new bricks, freshly made from the local supplier.

Regardless, there are still a lot to be seen. We hired the car (and the driver) to go to the section of great wall where it crosses a lake. The part of great wall is not very well-known and we had the whole park to ourselves. The mountain area in this part of China has very poor soil composition. Basically nothing can be grown out of it except from the peach and plum trees. The wall winds down the hill top to the lake yet goes up again to another mountain. The hills are pretty steep, it is really beyond my imagination how the wall was constructed 2000 years ago.

Standing on top of the wall on the hill top, looking out to the no-tree mountain far away with sun setting, this very much reminds me of my trip to Hadrian’s wall few years back. However, it certainly doesn’t rain as much as in Northern England.