Tom in China

- Interview with Dong Yaohui, vice president of the China Great Wall Society

The nine-window watchtower.

I visited Dong Yaohui, vice-president of the China Great Wall Society, at his home in Songzhuang, a new residential extension of urban Beijing’s Tongzhou District. He was in his studio at work on an oil painting of, unsurprisingly, the Great Wall. Several other oils of the Wall from various aspects hung on his studio walls.

Dong Yaohui was born and raised at the foot of the Ming Dynasty Great Wall in Hebei’s Qinhuangdao City. He set out from the Shanhai Pass in 1984 and walked for 508 days to the Jiayu Pass in Gansu Province where the Wall ends. Dong was the first person to measure the Great Wall on foot. He published his findings in his Field Survey of the Ming Dynasty Great Wall. Dong Yaohui has dedicated most of his working life to promoting the conservation, protection, repair, and development of the Great Wall.

The Great Wall is the landmark of China in the eyes of the Chinese and peoples of the world.

A survey among influential statesmen and entrepreneurs from 50 countries in connection with the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, headed by Feng Huiling, vice president of the Renmin University of China, confirms that the Great Wall is still the main sightseeing priority of visitors to China.

How Long Is the Great Wall?

“Most people associate the Great Wall with Badaling,” says Dong Yaohui, vice-president of the China Great Wall Society and authority on the subject. “Construction of the wall began during the Spring and Autumn Periods more than 2,000 years ago, and continued through to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Its total length exceeds 6,500 kilometers.” Badaling is just one 3.47-kilometer section of the Ming Dynasty Great Wall currently open to tourists, a length that will double in time for the 2008 Olympics.

The Great Wall has been synonymous with China since travelers and adventurers first spoke of the Middle Kingdom to the rest of the world.

The absence of mention of the Great Wall in the famous travelogue, The Travels of Marco Polo, is a main reason to doubt its veracity. Later visitors unfailingly referred to this ancient Chinese engineering feat. The 16th century Portuguese writer Fernauo Mendes Pinto, for instance, commented on the governmental practice of sending prisoners to build the Great Wall. The Spanish missionary Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza also spoke of, “the Great Wall that is 500 leagues long” (1 league = 4.8 kilometers) in his The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China (1585 edition), clearly stating, “the emperor who ordered its building was Qinshihuang.” Ferdinand Verbiest (1623~1688), a Belgian missionary resident in China for more than 20 years, remarked that the combined seven wonders of the world could not compare to the Great Wall, and that descriptions published in Europe failed to convey its true magnificence.

As greater numbers of missionaries and envoys visited China from the 16th century onwards, its image in the West became inextricably linked with the Great Wall. By the 18th century era of enlightenment it had become the ultimate symbol of both China and the Chinese civilization. Mendoza and Voltaire regarded the Wall as an aspect of China’s strength; others later perceived it as a sign of weakness. But the Western fascination with the Great Wall has never abated.

The Great Wall was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987, and voted one of the new Seven Wonders of the World in July 2007.

Despite its fame and glory, only 2,000 kilometers or so of the 6,500-kilometer-long Great Wall still stands. Its rate of conservation is outpaced by organic erosion and human damage.

Premier Wen Jiabao signed a State Council decree on October 11, 2006 enforcing the Regulations on the Protection of the Great Wall as of December 1, placing its protection on a legal basis. The conservation of this ancient Chinese engineering feat is now the common concern of the government, NGOs and everyday citizens of China.