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Badaling Great Wall
| The best-known section of the wall, and the one most people see, is at BADALING (daily 9am-4.30pm:RMB50), 70kin northwest of Beijing. It was the first section to be restored, in 1957, and opened up to tourists. Here the wall is 6m wide with regular watchtowers dating from the Ming dynasty. It follows the highest contours of a steep range of hills, fonmng a formidable defence, and this section was never attacked directly but taken by sweeping around from the side. |
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It’s the easiest part of the wall to get to but it’s also the most packaged, and to get the best out of it you need to escape the paths along which visitors are herded. A giant tourist circus greets you at the entrance, including a plethora of restaurants, rank after rank of souvenir stalls, a bank and post office. On the
wall, flanked with guardrails and metal bins and accompanied by hordes of other tourists, it’s hard to feel that there’s anything genuine about the experi ence. Indeed, the wall itself is hardly original here, being a modern recon struction on the ancient foundations. From the entrance you can walk along the wall to the north (left) or south (right). Few people get very far, which gives you a chance to lose the crowds and, generally, things get better the far ther you go. Unfortunately, the authorities have recently wised up to the attempts of tourists to enjoy themselves here, and it’s possible that guards will turn you back from unreconstructed sections.
If you head south, which most people do, you’ll come to a cable car ( RMB35), after about 2kin, which will take you down to a car park, and a zoo full of sad, mad bears. Keep going past the cable car and you’ll reach an unreconstructed section that in parts is quite hard to climb around.
Head north from the main entrance and you’ll shake off the crowds fairly quick ly. After about ikm you come to the end of the reconstructed section, and from here you call climb down onto the old wall and keep going. It’s on this ruined section that you get a much better impression of the wall’s real, more frightening, character - a lonely road plodding on and on through a silent landscape.
Practicalities
All the more expensive Beijing hotels and a few of the cheaper ones, as well as CITS, run tours to Badaling, with prices that are often absurd. If you come with a tour you’ll arrive in the early afternoon, when it’s at its busiest, spend an hour or two, then return, which really gives you little time for anything except the most cursory of jaunts, a few photo opportunities, and the purchase of an “I climbed the Great Wall” T-shirt. It’s just as easy, and cheaper, to travel under your own steam, and with more time at your disposal you can make for the more deserted sections.The easiest way to get here is on one of the tourist buses ( RMB36-50), which also go to the Ming Tombs . They look like ordinary buses but their numbers are written in green. Tourist buses #1 and #5 go from the north side of Qianmen Dong Dajie, opposite McDonald’S. Bus#2 goes from Belling Zhan, bus#4 from Xizhimen, by the zoo. The buses run daily 6-10am, departing every twenty minutes, and the journey takes about two hours. Much cheaper ( RMB10) is bus #919 from Deshengmen (a two-minute walk east front Jishuitan subway stop).
Related Information:
- Beijing Tourist Attractions
- China
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