Badaling tends to be the site where most tourists travel to visit the Great Wall - my first visit in 1999 was there, on a very foggy day - but Mutianyu is also a popular location, and has more dramatic scenery.  The wall has been restored in both locations as well as others.

Mutianyu has more watchtowers than the other sites, as seen here.  Fortunately, the wall is not visited much during the winter, and after a cable ride to the top, I had much of it to myself this late afternoon.  This view is to the southeast, up a very steep incline.

The first unified parts of the wall were constructed during the Qin dynasty over 2,200 years ago, but those were much smaller than this section, which was originally built during the Ming dynasty.  This particular restoration was much more recent, to offload some of Badaling’s tourist traffic.

The wall is also called the “10,000 Li Wall” by the Chinese, which translates to about 5,000 miles.  From the sea at Shanhaiguan it snakes west into the Gobi desert.  A good 30 li of the wall can be seen from this location.

A view of another part of the wall from inside one of its many watchtowers.  When invaders would approach from the north, guards along these watchtowers would light fires on top to signal guards in adjoining towers, who would light fires of their own to pass along the warning.  The opening sequence of Disney’s “Mulan”, which I worked on, depicts such an event.

Before the Qin dynasty, there were actually many separate walls built by kingdoms throughout what is now northern China.  Emperor Qin, who unified China, unified the walls as well, but the result never worked as well as intended - guards could be bribed.  However, it did serve as a useful highway through the mountains.

It wasn’t until the Ming dynasty more than a millenia later that the wall was rebuilt in full, to something resembling the current restored state.  The effort took a hundred years, hundreds of thousands of people, and millions of cubic meters of rock.

Much of the wall has crumbled since the Ming dynasty, but parts of it near Beijing have been restored for the sake of the tourist industry and local employment - including the long stretch of wall in the distance behind this watchtower.  However, other sections of the Beijing-area wall, such as the one at Huanghua, are still in their original Ming dynasty state and still well preserved.  I hope to visit Huanghua in the near future to see the real thing.

It was very late in the afternoon when I took this last shot, and the cable ride back down the mountain had already closed for the day - at least that’s what its lounging operators told me.  So instead, I took a tobaggan ride, of all things, along a metal chute to the bottom.  I wouldn’t say it was fun, but after sweating through long stair climbs like the one shown here, the cold wind certainly was refreshing.