Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  A woman from the ethnic Han majority, wearing a red dress embroidered with the national flower, the peony, stands with her hand raised aloft. Representing the heartland of China, she’s surrounded by people of eleven ethnic minorities, mainly from the country’s geographical peripheries. They’re distinguishable by their brown, wavy hair, their national dress or their distinctive footwear: among them are a Korean, a Mongol, a Uyghur and a Kazakh.

  Nationalities from the edges gathering around a woman from the centre, and all of them standing on the majestic Great Wall: this is what is promoted as the embodiment of New China. The people are strong but friendly, a united nation of ethnic diversity living harmoniously and cultivating friendships with foreigners from afar. This ideal contrasts starkly with the Wall’s historical role as a military defence. It counters the misguided view that the Great Wall cordoned off a hermit culture, one closed to the world.

  Touches of modernity appear. One man clutches a camera, ready to record the joy of friendship in a group photograph, while another plays an accordion, making music, the perfect cross-cultural dialect. The moment captured by the artist shows the group releasing of a flock of doves, international symbols of peace.

  ‘The Friendship of the Great Wall is Endless’ was painted in 1960 by Liu Danzhai (1931–2011), a graduate of the China College of Art, Shanghai, during Communist China’s age of ‘prop art’. The genre began in the revolutionary years at Yan’an, during the mid-1930s, and began to wane after posters promoted the drive to achieve ‘the Four Modernisations’, a campaign of the early reform period of the 1980s.

  Despite sabre-rattling by the main powers at the end of World War II, none really wanted or could afford more war. A costly Cold War did ensue, however, between the Western Allies and the Soviet Bloc, while a much warmer and cheaper propaganda offensive was launched in China, aimed at gaining wider international recognition. China’s relations with Western countries were generally strained, and by the late 1950s the Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was under great ideological strain. After the split in 1960, China was left with only a limited number of working relationships – with some Eastern European and ‘developing world’ states. The second group on the Wall, in the background of our poster, are mainly Africans, enjoying the friendship experience provided by their Chinese hosts.

  There are few earlier images that illustrate the Great Wall’s adoption as a national icon, a sign of peace and a must-see destination for foreign friends. This portrayal on the poster looks ahead to something that was already under construction: a designated Great Wall site for foreign guests visiting the PRC (a theme we will explore with our next object). While the location featured on the poster is imaginary, its character is definitely ‘Badaling-esque’.

  DESCRIPTION: Youyi Changcheng Wanli Chang (‘The Friendship of the Great Wall is Endless’), colour poster, 110 centimetres by eighty centimetres, 1960

  SIGNIFICANCE: Marks the Great Wall’s emergence as a symbol of ethnic friendship and international peace

  ORIGIN: Painted by Liu Danzhai, Shanghai; 250 000 copies were printed and distributed nationwide via Xinhua bookstores

  LOCATION: Author’s collection, Beijing

  Conveniently located on Beijing’s doorstep, eighty kilometres outside the city, Badaling, with its magnificent vistas and paramount building quality, was a natural choice as the most favoured Wall-viewing spot. Its forbidding valley approach was experienced by only the most adventurous visitors, among them the Scotsman John Thompson, who in 1871 endured a four-day round trip to get there and back for his prize – the first professional images of the battlements. In 1909 construction of the Beijing–Kalgan (Zhangjiakou) railway line made an away-day from the city to the Wall quite manageable. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India was the first foreign head of state to officially visit the Wall, in October 1954, hosted by Premier Zhou Enlai.

  Photographers to record future diplomatic visits only arrived from 1958. The earliest such photo shows a rather grumpy-looking Soviet defence minister Kliment Voroshilov, his expression indicative of the prevalent chill between Mao and Khrushchev – and perhaps also of the roughness of the conditions, for the climb up the ramparts appears unrestored. Later images show the battlements made safer for the increasingly frequent diplomatic processions. The Wall was firmly installed as a standard part of diplomatic protocol, an obligatory ‘off-site’ for each visiting head of state, regardless of the weather. Many foreigners donned headgear offered by their thoughtful Chinese hosts: large fur hats with earflaps in winter, or wide-brimmed straw hats in summer.

  As of June 2014, some 490 heads of state – kings, queens, presidents, ayatollahs, chairmen, archbishops and governors – had walked the Great Wall at Badaling. China’s Foreign Affairs Minister through most of the 1990s, Qian Qichen, referred to it as a monument recording new China diplomatic relations. In fact, over six decades it has in fact contributed to China’s ‘soft power’ offensive in its own right, providing millions of foreign tourists with their most endearing memories of a once unassailable land.

  The Great Wall has taken on its new role with surprising ease and grace. Few visitors seem particularly conscious or concerned with its bloody and terrible past; they seem positively seduced by its scale, overawed by its majesty, impressed by its beauty. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, visiting in 1987, reportedly said: ‘It’s one of the most beautiful places that I have ever visited.’

  49.

  ‘Love our China, Rebuild our Great Wall’

  Painting depicting Deng Xiaoping at the Great Wall

  One of the more unusual books in my Great Wall library is Changcheng Jushou, or ‘Gathering of Heads of State on the Great Wall’, an illustrated who’s who in New China’s diplomatic relations between 1958 and 2004. You can learn a lot by flicking through its pages: about state visits, slack periods, busy periods, milestones. There was a diplomatic chill from spring 1966 to spring 1972, with Nixon breaking the ice in February. In summer 1973 the President of Mali visited. Traffic peaked between May 1983 and May 1989; that spring there were seventy-two visits.

  These dates, periods and personages provide a useful political background check as we try to understand this unusual object, a modern painting produced to advocate defence of the defences on cultural rather than military grounds. It portrays a stately and besuited Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) surveying the Great Wall as it snakes its way across mountains and through a sea of clouds. This is the same man who, as vice-premier, escorted the Mali delegation on 22 June 1973: a significant date in the Wall’s modern history, when the right man first became aligned to a rightful cause. Five years later, having survived demotion and demonisation by the Gang of Four, Deng bounced back. In 1978 he became China’s paramount leader, and in 1984 he returned to the Great Wall.

  A visionary, Deng reformed everything. The self-appointed architect of restructuring and rehabilitation, he set about changing China: from closed to open, from rural to urban, from wholly agricultural to partly industrial, from entirely poor to partly rich, from overly political to more pragmatic, from overpowering to understanding. Taking a calligraphy brush in hand on 20 September 1984, he wrote ‘Ai wo Zhonghua, xiu wo Changcheng’, or ‘Love our China, rebuild our Great Wall’.

  Strictly speaking, the brush was put in his hand, and the words were put into his mouth. A Beijing journalist had asked Vice-Premier Xi Zhongxun (father of the current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping) to support Badaling’s efforts to fund an extension of its rebuilt ramparts by asking for the paramount leader to promote the idea in a project slogan. Aware of Badaling’s importance for diplomatic ‘walk and talks’, Deng agreed. The scheme not only paid off, bringing in funds for the work, it also created a banner that was hoisted elsewhere to finance similar repair work.

  However, the composition did more than transform a few sections of Wild Wall into ‘Tourist Wall’. The leader’s magic touch transformed a slogan composed for one project in one place into the central tenet of a much wider
and spiritually deeper cause: the Great Wall’s protection, and the rehabilitation of a self-wounded nation, with Deng as its patron saint. In the painting titled ‘Spring Wind from the East’, Deng’s calligraphic call has been transformed into allegorical art, showing the man who brought an end to the Great Wall’s, and metaphorically China’s, dark winter by ushering in of a new season of rebuilding and hope.

  From seven pencilled characters and the date on its reverse – ‘1994.09’ – we know that the artist produced the painting to mark the tenth anniversary of Deng’s act. Any Chinese above the age of twenty would see the connection immediately. The lack of a signature on the painting is typical of the cautious self-preservation by artists when their subjects were state leaders – in case their work might be seen as a political slight.

  DESCRIPTION: Dongfeng Chuilai Manyan Chun, (‘Spring Wind from the East’), a watercolour painting of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping surveying a Great Wall vista; seventy-eight centimetres by forty-seven centimeters

  SIGNIFICANCE: A picturesque interpretation of Deng’s influential call ‘Ai wo Zhonghua, xiu wo Changcheng’, (‘Love our China, rebuild our Great Wall’), written in 1984, which inspired reconstruction projects and ushered in the concept of Great Wall protection

  ORIGIN: Painted in September 1994, on the tenth Anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s call for action

  LOCATION: Author’s collection, Beijing

  The eight characters of Deng’s chosen phrase are in classic duizhang, or couplet style, being numerically and phonetically balanced four-character clusters. While the composition obviously encourages patriotic love by rebuilding the Great Wall, it also alludes to recent episodes of destruction – of the Wall in particular, and of China’s cultural heritage in general. Wo is used as an abbreviated form of women, meaning ‘our’, thus making the four character clusters possible, and stressing the need for ‘us’ to undergo a spiritual healing, for many people had participated in acts of wanton vandalism.

  Just as Deng improved the Wall’s health in the 1980s through his writing, Mao had damaged it during his rule by his speech. He orchestrated public campaigns, in which participation was mandatory. The mobilisation of a workforce of a few hundred million out of the population of 600 million in 1960, hyped by revolutionary propaganda, could have produced good or bad results. ‘Correct’ policies brought national pride – for example, in the construction of the mighty Nanjing Bridge across the Yangzi River. ‘Incorrect’ policies brought unmitigated disasters, to people, places and everything. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution unleashed forces that would lead to the destruction of a great deal of China’s national heritage, including the Great Wall. Both were later condemned by Deng Xiaoping when he was party leader. During what was the frankest political interview in New China’s history, with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1980, Deng described the campaigns as ‘Comrade Mao Zedong’s errors’.

  The Great Leap Forward induced ‘three difficult years’ from 1958 to 1961 as a result of Mao’s foolhardy attempts to accelerate economic performance. His infamous policies ranged from bird-killing hunts – part of an effort to boost crop production – to advocating the use of backyard smelters to enable China to surpass Great Britain’s iron and steel output. In construction, the people were encouraged to ‘Let the past serve the present’ – in other words, to use old building materials. Yet this was minor when compared to the rampage inspired by the ‘Smash the Four Olds’ campaign. Launched in August 1966, just months after the start of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese people were ordered to destroy old culture, customs, habits and ideas.

  Mao died ten years later, in September of 1976, and so did his Cultural Revolution – at least in name. I arrived in China less than ten years later, and from this point in our Great Wall story I’ve actually been present to witness the changes the structure underwent. I saw many Deng-inspired reconstruction sites, and I saw quite a few instances of destruction.

  In 1999 I saw a farmer using a gao (a farming tool) to knock bricks loose from a watchtower turret; he was putting them in his basket and carrying them down to his Wall-side farmhouse. Passing through his hamlet five minutes later, I saw that all the buildings there were made of Great Wall bricks. Work making use of newly collected bricks was continuing; the past was still serving the present.

  In 2000 I saw, for what turned out to be the last time, a perfectly preserved engraved tablet, dated 1570, at Huanghuacheng. It weighed perhaps 250 kilograms, but a farmer moved it to an inaccessible location a couple of months later. He was charging two yuan to use a ladder to go down and see the tablet, which had fractured in the process of moving.

  In more recent years, at Jiankou’s Zhengbeilou, I saw a mortared brick stairway – which, since the tower’s construction in around 1618, had served as an entrance to its high doorway – gradually become lower and lower. Course by course it was demolished by a local farmer, making it necessary for walkers to use a ladder – for a fee, of course.

  The first of these three examples differs from the other two. It’s almost condonable as a means of survival, and it’s a problem that has largely been overcome by education. But in the latter examples the perpetrators weighed up the risk against the potential gain. Considering it unlikely that they’d be reported, investigated or punished, they destroyed the Wall in order to profit.

  Pondering these cases leads me to two conclusions. First, it’s apparent that the culture of destruction created by Mao didn’t die with him. Second, although Deng launched Great Wall conservation by writing the campaign banner, even his widely respected authority wasn’t strong enough, nor his vision far-sighted enough, for ‘Love our China, Rebuild our Great Wall’ to be a panacea. It opened up a new era, brought the hope of every spring. At the same time, the side-effects of China’s successful economic reform would soon conspire to impact on the Wall.

  Several factors prevented more mileage from being squeezed from Deng’s slogan. While Chinese society and lifestyles changed, one attitude remained exactly the same: turning a blind eye to damage. During Mao’s time, destruction targeted sections of Wall that were most easily reached, while most Wild Wall sections stayed intact. Increasing social mobility since 2000, enabled by Deng’s legacy and economic reform theories, has given large numbers of people the means and the opportunity to reach Wall that was previously preserved by its remoteness. In the past, damage to the Wall was caused by revolution or poverty; now, the problems are caused by the wealthier class: littering, graffiti and encroaching developments.

  In September 1984 Deng became the first leader of China in more than 350 years to lead a campaign to ‘maintain’ the Great Wall, and the first to do so not for war but for peace. His brushwork ushered in the era of Great Wall protection. In 1985 he was named ‘Man of the Year’ by Time magazine for instituting ‘sweeping economic reforms that have challenged Marxist orthodoxies’.

  In 1987 the Great Wall was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Fifteen years later, in 2002, and then again in 2004, the Great Wall landscape around Beijing was placed on the World Monuments Fund’s list of the World’s 100 Most Endangered Sites.

  50.

  A Gift to China

  Pair of photos of Luowenyu, 80 years apart

  From the outset, my meeting with this Great Wall expert promised to be quite different from any other. For one thing, he was dead. Secondly, he was a ‘foreigner’ like me, and thirdly, I met him in a book that was gifted to me. The Great Wall of China by William Edgar Geil was swathed in bubble-wrap, a sensible precaution given it was eighty years old. When I opened the book, I felt like I was greeting the author with a hearty handshake.

  I turned its foxed pages carefully, soon realising from its illustrations that the author had made my journey seventy-nine years earlier. I wasn’t William the Conqueror – I was William the Second. Our respective sets of photographs showed the diverse appearance and architecture that we had each seen, and the varied landscapes we had crossed as w
e followed the Wall. He rode and walked west, while I went entirely on foot, heading east. Our journeys were parallel, often adjacent, sometimes intersecting.

  One special point of convergence became clear when I saw Geil’s photograph of ‘Mule Horse Pass’: I’d included the same view in my book Alone on the Great Wall. My caption had been ‘Luowenyu’, but there was another major point of difference. The 1908 black-and-white photo showed Geil sitting in front of a watchtower, while my colour photo in 1987, taken in self-timer mode, showed me walking in front of a mound – the watchtower had gone. What had happened?

  ‘Perhaps the book is too late to be of use,’ Mrs Marjorie Hessel-Tiltman had written as she mailed her copy of Geil’s book to me. In fact, her timing was perfect.

  In 1908 Geil had captured a full-length view of the Wall before a series of damaging events unfolded that made China a hostile environment for man and monument alike. By the late 1970s, a great many changes had occurred, and many components of the Wall were no longer there, as I would discover.

  The next significant date in this story was 31 December 1999. Never before had so many people awaited a new millennium, and with such eagerness and trepidation,. I set off for the Wall from my farmhouse in the hamlet of Xizhazi shortly before midnight. The approaching moment, the antiquity of place and a face-numbing minus 23 degrees Celsius made for an emotional but silent atmosphere among my companions and me. It was a solemn moment in time for all of us.

  I was particularly conscious of how tremendously impactful humankind’s last-minute appearance on our ancient planet has been. If the whole existence of our planet took place over twenty-four hours, we modern humans have only been active for the last few minutes. We began to become ‘civilised’ just moments ago, and since then, we have unleashed changes that seem to threaten to destroy us altogether. If we lose the wisdom of our history teachers, how will we be aware of what we have done wrong?