Great Wall of China

Overview

The Great Wall of China is a chain of Ming dynasty frontier fortifications running through the mountains north of Beijing, and walking a stretch of it is the main reason most people leave the city for a day. There is no single wall. The name covers a discontinuous system of ramparts, trenches and watchtowers built and rebuilt by successive Chinese states over two thousand years, and a 2012 survey by the National Cultural Heritage Administration measured all of it, every dynasty included, at 21,196 km.

The sections you can reach from Beijing are Ming work, the brick-faced, crenellated line built from 1368 onwards to keep Mongol cavalry away from the capital. The 2009 survey of the Ming wall alone counted 8,850 km, of which 6,259 km is actual wall, 359 km trenches and 2,232 km hills and rivers pressed into service as natural barriers. Older walls survive further west, as rammed earth in the Gobi, but nobody does those as a day trip. UNESCO inscribed the whole system in 1987, and it was voted one of the New 7 Wonders of the World in 2007.

What you get for a day out of Beijing is a ridge walk on a 16th-century military road, with a watchtower every few hundred metres and views over forested hills that look, on a clear day, exactly like the photographs. The catch is choosing where. Badaling is the closest, most restored and most crowded. Mutianyu is restored too, greener, less busy, and has a chairlift up and a toboggan down. Jinshanling is partly restored and partly left alone, and is where the classic ridge-line photographs come from. Jiankou is unrestored, unfenced and the most dangerous section in Beijing municipality. Each is a separate trip. Pick one, and pick it before you book anything.

History

The grey-brick wall zigzagging over the hills in every photograph is a Ming construction, and mostly a late Ming one. The idea behind it is far older.

Warring States to Qin

The northern Chinese states were building rammed-earth ramparts against each other and against the steppe peoples long before there was a China. When the state of Qin won its wars of unification in 221 BC, the First Emperor ordered new walls to connect the surviving northern fortifications into one frontier line. Almost nothing of that wall stands above ground. The Han pushed a line west along the Silk Road, and the Qin, Han and earlier wall sites together total 3,080 km, most of it earth and most of it far from Beijing. Before the Ming, the material was rammed earth, stone and wood.

The Ming and the turn to brick

The Hongwu Emperor drove the Mongol Yuan out and founded the Ming in 1368, but for its first eighty years the dynasty fought on the steppe rather than hiding behind walls. That changed with the Tumu Crisis of 1449, when a Ming army marched north and lost more than half its men, and again after Altan Khan raided up to the outskirts of Beijing in 1550. After that the court paid for walls, and paid for them in brick. The sections near Beijing are stacked brick over a rubble core, bonded with a mortar of sticky rice soup and slaked lime, with tiles, lime and cut stone where the ground allowed.

Qi Jiguang’s towers

The watchtowers are the part of the wall you spend most time in, and most of the ones north of Beijing are the work of one general. Qi Jiguang was called to Beijing in late 1567 and the following year given command of the troops at Jizhou, the garrison covering the capital. He repaired the wall between Shanhai Pass and Juyong Pass and oversaw the building of more than a thousand watchtowers in two years. He and Tan Lun had asked for 3,000 brick towers; the court signed off on 1,200, built between 1567 and 1570 from Shanhaiguan to Changping, the first hollow brick towers on the wall, with room inside for soldiers, stores and a fire. Mutianyu was rebuilt in 1569 under this programme, and Jinshanling built from 1570.

1644 and after

The wall’s end as a working defence came on 25 May 1644, when the Ming general Wu Sangui opened the gates at Shanhai Pass and let the Manchu army through. Beijing had already fallen to a peasant rebellion; the Manchus walked in and founded the Qing. The Qing came from north of the line and had no use for it, so for three centuries it was quarried, farmed against and forgotten. Badaling was rebuilt as the showpiece and became the first section opened to tourism in 1957; Mutianyu was restored between 1983 and 1986 and opened to everyone in 1988. Neglect is still the bigger story. The 2012 survey found that 22 percent of the Ming wall, 1,961 km of it, has disappeared entirely.

Visiting

The practical card on this page carries Mutianyu’s hours and price, because that is the section to choose for a first visit. Figures for the other sections are given where a source exists.

Mutianyu

Mutianyu is 70 km northeast of central Beijing in Huairou District. The restored stretch is 2,250 m long with 22 watchtowers, the wall 7 to 8.5 m high and 4 to 5 m wide on top, on slopes that are almost entirely forest. Entry is 40 CNY, with cable car, shuttle bus and toboggan charged separately. The cable car is 100 one way and 140 return. Hours from 16 March to 15 November are 07:30 to 18:00 on weekdays and 07:30 to 18:30 at weekends; from 16 November to 15 March it is 08:00 to 17:30. Ticket sales stop an hour before closing and the gate stops admitting people half an hour before.

Two lifts go up from the ticket area: the cable car lands at tower 14 and the chairlift at tower 6, and the toboggan runs back down through the trees from the chairlift end. The walk between the two landing points covers the best of the restored wall, including Zhengguantai, the platform with three towers on it above the old pass. If you would rather climb, there are more than 4,000 steps.

By public transport, bus 916 express from Dongzhimen goes to Huairou Beidajie, where bus H24 to the Mutianyu car park runs only twice a day, at 08:40 and 15:45; a shuttle service picking up in central Beijing charges about ¥80. Bus 867 leaves Dongzhimen for Mutianyu at 07:00 and 08:30.

Badaling

About 80 km northwest of the city centre, Badaling was built in 1504 to cover Juyong Pass and is the section Richard Nixon walked on 24 February 1972. It is the easiest to reach: high-speed trains from Beijing North or Qinghe (on subway Line 13) stop at Badaling Great Wall station, 60 m underground and the deepest high-speed station in the world, and bus 877 from Beitucheng takes about an hour, with the last bus out around 12:30 and the last back around 17:00. Entry is around ¥40, and walking the whole open stretch takes two to three hours at a steady pace.

Jinshanling

Jinshanling is 125 km northeast in Luanping County, Hebei, just over the municipal border. It runs 10.5 km with 5 passes, 67 towers and 3 beacon towers, restored at the start and progressively rawer as it heads east towards Simatai. Entry is 65 RMB, the cable car 40, the suspension bridge 5, and continuing onto Simatai costs a further 50. Public transport is thin; most people come by hired car or on an organised hiking trip.

Jiankou

Jiankou is 73 km north of Beijing, 20 km of wall first built in 1368 and reworked until 1644, running from Mutianyu’s 23rd tower to the junction of three walls called the Beijing Knot. It is unrestored apart from a 750 m stretch conserved between 2015 and 2019, and weathering has made it the most precarious section in Beijing. The named features are the reason people come: the Sky Stair, which climbs at 70 to 80 degrees, the Eagle Flies Facing Upward tower, the three-storey Nine-Eye Tower and Zhengbei Tower for sunrise. The usual walk starts at Nanjili in Xizhazi village, an hour’s hike up to the wall, and ends at Mutianyu tower 23.

Tips

• Book Mutianyu under your real name. Tickets are sold by real-name reservation up to 30 days ahead, one ticket per ID document per day, and you show the original passport at the gate. Ticket enquiries go to 010 6162 6928.

• Go for the first hour after opening. Crowds and haze both build through the morning, and the public bus to Badaling stops running out of the city at lunchtime, so the day is front-loaded anyway. At Badaling the crowd thins sharply once you are past the first few towers.

• Ignore anyone selling a Great Wall tour at a bus stop. Wikivoyage’s standing warning is that street-sold “tours” at ¥100 to 150 are a scam and the real bus costs about ¥20.

• The toboggan is not a children’s ride. It is over 1.5 km of metal chute with a 100 m drop and you work the brake yourself. Long trousers, and let the slow family ahead of you get a head start.

• Dress for a ridge, not for Beijing. Mutianyu runs from 486 m to 1,039 m above sea level and Badaling’s high point, Beibalou, is at 1,015 m, so it is windier and colder than the city in every season. Steps are uneven and of wildly different heights: proper shoes, not sandals.

• Treat Jiankou as a mountain, not a monument. Unrestored, no handrails, and the steepest pitches are close to vertical. Go with someone who has walked it recently, and go on a dry day.

• Late September for the colour. That is when the forest below Mutianyu and Jiankou starts to turn, and the wall is at its most photogenic. Winter has ice on the steps and shorter hours; summer has the haze.

• Bring water and lunch up with you. Nothing on the wall itself is reliable, and at Mutianyu the shuttle bus between the car park and the ticket gate is a separate ¥15 return ticket you will not want to pay twice for a forgotten bottle.

Nearby

The sections are far enough apart that “nearby” depends on which one you chose.

The Ming Tombs are the standard pairing with Badaling: both lie in the hills north of the city, built by the same dynasty, and most organised day trips do them together. Down the pedestrian street at Badaling, the Great Wall Museum is free, open 09:00 to 16:00 and closed on Mondays, with a walk-through of the wall’s history across the dynasties.

Yanqing, the district Badaling sits in, hosted the alpine skiing, bobsleigh, luge and skeleton events of the 2022 Winter Olympics, which matters if you are coming between December and February and want to ski.

Huairou town is the changeover point for Mutianyu and Jiankou, under an hour from Wangjing West on bus 866 and about an hour and a half from Dongzhimen.

Simatai and Gubei Water Town sit 120 km northeast in Miyun District, at the far end of the Jinshanling traverse. Simatai is 5.4 km of wall with 35 towers, closed in June 2010 and reopened in 2014; tower 16, at 986 m, is the highest cultural relic in Beijing, and the Sky Bridge narrows to 40 cm across in places. Gubei Water Town below it is a reconstructed canal town built for weekenders, and Simatai sells separate night tickets to walk the floodlit wall above it.

Back in the city, the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace are the imperial counterparts to the dynasty that built the wall you walked.