by William Lindesay
Reviewed by Valery Garrett
Like Everest, some want to travel the Great Wall, just because it's there. A source of wonderment for centuries, and the largest of all UNESCO World Heritages, the huge scale of the Wall is so immense that when guards manned watchtowers at its eastern end (Old Dragon's Head), they would have seen sunrise a full 80 minutes before their counterparts at its western end (Jiayuguan). Even its length is in doubt, since it has never been measured specifically. Most settle for 5,000km.
William Lindesay, a British geologist and marathoner, came to China in 1986 and the following year spent nine months running and hiking along the Wall, making headlines at a time when China was just opening up again to the world. Since then others have followed in his footsteps, but few have been as obsessed.
After hearing Lindesay speak on the radio in England about his journey, a listener sent him a copy of the book The Great Wall of China, written American missionary, William Edgar Geil, the first explorer to travel the full extent of the Wall in 1908. Seeing Geil's photographs of the same locations as his own, eighty years apart, inspired Lindesay to retrace Geil's route and search for tracks left by other earlier Wall explorers: "It was this perchance collaborations and the thoughts of change which it provoked that prompted me to source vintage Great Wall photographs with the intentions of embarking upon systematic and broad rephotographic documentation."
Rephotography was one of the main reasons for the book. To do this, Lindesay set out again in 2004 carrying a camera and his collection of vintage photographs taken by those earlier travelers, dating back to 1871. He revisited seven of the regions on the Great Wall, and compares the sights today with those experienced by earlier travelers. "Milestone personalities" include the Jade Gate Pass with Aurel Stein in 1907; Jiayuguan with Geil in 1908; Northern Shaanxi Province with Robert Clark and Arthur de C Sowerby in 1908, and Frederick Clapp in 1914; Laiyuan County, Hebei with Sha Fei in 1937; Beijing with photographer John Thomson in 1871 and Juliet Bredon in 1919; Gubeikou with William Parish in 1793; and Shanhaiguan with artist Mr Smythe in 1850.
For three years Lindesay searched for places he could compare the present with those earlier photos. These pictures are woven into the book, sitting side by side with present day evidence. In many cases, he adopts the same pose, even down to the hat and the horse, as his predecessors. "As author, I have chosen historical extracts, gathered contemporary stories and seized on poignant quotes made by eyewitnesses. I have tried to be objective. While some rephotographic pairings reveal loss, some show gains, in more ways than one.… The book is not only a collection of comparative photographs, but a combination of people's stories, historical and contemporary, and pairs of photographs showing and telling how the Wall has changed."
In many places the Wall has been deliberately dismantled, as for instance with the Sister Towers of the Ming wall at Gubeikou. This section was damaged by the Japanese during the war; used to make shelters by the People's Liberation Army while constructing a railway in the 1970s; and finally used by local farmers to surround the family farm. In another site, Tangzigou, photos taken just one year apart show wanton destruction.
The layout of the book is pleasing and orderly. Lindesay is clearly in love with his subject, and enjoyed collecting illustrations to accompany the text, some never before published. "I have inevitably written a book with feeling, because the subject matter - the future of the Great Wall -- is a passionate concern of mine." Since settling in Beijing, he has published four Wall-related books, and founded the International Friends of the Great Wall, a small organization that also focuses on conservation. It's odd perhaps that there is no mention of other supporters, inveterate researcher David Spindler in Beijing, or Diego Azubel who walked the length of the Wall in 2002.
Today the popularity of the Wall is reflected in the numbers of visitors it attracts, albeit at the nearest points to the capital. In the 1880s, the number of visitors -- mainly foreigners -- was less than 100 a year at Badaling, the closest section to Beijing. The latest figures from 2004 put them at up to 4.5m, mostly domestic tourists. Protection and preservation is thus more important than ever.
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Valery Garrett has been a regular visitor to China since 1975 from her home in Hong Kong. She is the author of many books on Chinese dress and antiques, her latest being Heaven is High, the Emperor Far Away: Merchants and Mandarins in Old Canton, a history of Guangzhou, published by Oxford University Press.
Source: Asian Review of Books
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