Chinese city opens restored Great Wall to tourists

A woman walks with her bicyle past a partially refurbished section of the Dajingmen Great Wall yesterday in the historic garrison town of Zhangjiakou. PHOTO: AFP

But a battle-scarred section in the historic garrison town of Zhangjiakou, 180 kilometers (110 miles) northwest of Beijing, is one of the first to allow visitors to walk next to the ancient edifice in its natural state.

The Great Wall's Dajingmen Gate is being restored for tourism, but unlike other tourist sites along the wall it has been left largely in its natural state of decay.

"In the Zhangjiakou region, archaeologists have found remnants of the Great Wall dating to the Qin Dynasty over 2,200 years ago," Chang Jingzhong, head of the Zhangjiakou cultural affairs bureau, told AFP.

"There are also parts of the wall built in successive dynasties afterwards including the Han, Northern Wei, Tang, Jin, Ming and Qing Dynasties.

"This is why we call Zhangjiakou a Great Wall Museum."

A new park along the Taiping Mountain Range above the west side of the Dajingmen Gate allows tourists to climb along several kilometers (miles) of tree-covered pathways next to the crumbling wall in varying states of disrepair.

The park is the answer to increasing demands by Great Wall enthusiasts and tourists who have longed to be able to visit the ancient wall in a natural state, but who have also feared that increasing tourist traffic will further erode the structure.

"The Dajingmen Gate is the symbol of Zhangjiakou, so we are trying to preserve the historic record as best we can, while also making it accessible to tourists," Chang said.

"The gate itself once marked China's northern border and largely dates to the early Ming Dynasty (around 1368), but was rebuilt again during the Qing Dynasty in 1546."

The gate is one of the four major historic passes along the Great Wall, and was the first gate in a line of defenses protecting the capital from Mongolian and other armies north of China.

Although the gate and a stretch of the wall in Zhangjiakou city proper are being renovated, the wall on the Taiping Mountain ridge has been largely spared of the rebuilding that other Great Wall tourist sites have undertaken.

The Juyongyuan Gate, just outside Beijing near the ever popular Badaling Great Wall, has been massively rebuilt as one of the wall's great gates and was once the second line of the capital's defense after the Dajingmen.

The other two great gates are Shanhaiguan, also known as the "Old Dragon's Head", where the eastern-most end of the Great Wall falls into the Bohai Sea, and the Jiayuguang Gate to the west where the wall disappears into the deserts of Gansu province.

Although the distance between Shanhaiguan to Jiayuguang is nearly 1,600 kilometers (992 miles) as the bird flies, the actual wall is estimated to be over 6,000 kilometers long as it winds back and forth along mountain ridges.

Zhangjiakou, often referred to in history books by its Mongolian name of Kalgan, is situated in a strategic pass that competing armies have fought over for several millennia.