The Great Wall and the Walls of China: Four Walls, Four Enemies

01Four Walls, Four Enemies

What kinds of walls are there in China besides the Great Wall?

China has walls at four scales: the empire's, the city's, the coast's and the family's. Each was built against one particular enemy, and the enemy tells you how to read the wall. The empire's wall was built against horsemen and traded height for time. The coast's wall was built against steamships and lost. The family's wall was built against bandits and is still lived in.

The empire's wall is the Great Wall 长城, and it is a system of four levels. Wall, tower, pass and garrison town, four levels, from the sea at Shanhaiguan 山海关 to the desert at Jiayuguan 嘉峪关, with an older earth wall running on past Dunhuang 敦煌 into the Gobi. Fourteen of the forty places on this page belong to it, and they come in three states a visitor must know apart: restored, where the brick is new and the steps are safe; original, where the Ming 明, 14th to 17th century brick is still in place with the maker's marks on it; and wild, where the wall has fallen in and nobody sells tickets.

The city's wall is the one you can ride a bicycle on. Eight walled cities on this page still have their circuit, from Xi'an 西安's fourteen kilometres to a Song 宋, 10th to 13th century wall at Ganzhou 赣州 where every brick carries a date. Two mountain fortresses belong here too, because they were walls against the same enemy as the Great Wall and, unlike it, they won: a Mongol khan died under one of them in 1259.

The coast's wall is the newest and the saddest. Four forts and a naval base, from a Ming harbour for the fleet that fought the pirates to the Qing 清, 17th to early 20th century gun batteries that met the Royal Navy in 1841 and the Japanese in 1895. The guns are still there. The wall did not work, and the survey is honest that this is where modern China begins.

The family's wall is the one foreigners have seen in photographs. The round earth buildings 土楼 of Fujian 福建, the tower-houses of Kaiping 开平碉楼 built by emigrants home from California, and the stone village of the Qiang 羌族 in the mountains above Chengdu 成都 are all fortifications, against bandits, against clan feuds, against the next valley, and all three still have people in them, which is why they belong to this page for their walls and to the old-town page for their life.

How to use the page. Decide which enemy interests you. First-time visitors want the empire's wall near Beijing and one of its two ends; people who have done that want the passes of the north and the walls that turned into markets; walkers want the wild sections and the mountain fortresses; anyone in the south wants a city wall and a family's wall. The survey's forty are sorted that way below, with the honest note on every one of what is Ming and what was rebuilt last century.

02What the Great Wall Is

How long is the Great Wall, who built it, and what is it made of?

The Great Wall 长城 is not one wall and was never finished. It is two thousand years of walls built by different states against different horsemen, and the brick one in the photographs is the last hundred years of it.

The count and the material. The state heritage survey of 2012 measured every wall it could find and put the total at just over twenty-one thousand kilometres, by the survey's citation. Most of that is earth: rammed earth 夯土, or in the desert sand packed between layers of reed and tamarisk that the salt has kept for two millennia. The Ming 明, 14th to 17th century wall, the one visitors mean, is under nine thousand kilometres of it by the survey's figure, and only the stretches near Beijing were faced in brick and stone.

Who built which. The oldest wall on the page is not the First Emperor 秦始皇's: the state of Qi 齐国 in Shandong 山东 began one around 685 BC, four centuries before him, and you can still walk a stretch of it for free. The Qin 秦, 3rd century BC joined the northern walls into one after 221 BC; the Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD pushed an earth wall west past Dunhuang 敦煌 with a chain of beacon towers to carry news to the capital in hours; the Ming, after 1368, rebuilt the whole northern line and organised it as nine frontier commands with garrison towns behind it. Everything a visitor climbs near Beijing dates from the Ming's last century.

The idea was to trade height for time. A wall does not stop a cavalry army; it slows one. Horsemen who have to dismount, find a breach and pass through in file give the towers time to light their fires and the garrison towns time to move troops. That is why the wall runs along ridges where a horse cannot climb anyway: the ridge is the wall, and the brick on top is the signal line.

The towers came from the coast. In the 1550s a general named Qi Jiguang 戚继光, fighting Japanese pirates on the Zhejiang coast, built two-storey hollow towers into the city wall of Linhai 临海 so that soldiers could live, store grain and shoot from inside them. In 1567 he was sent north to command the Beijing frontier and spent sixteen years turning its earth wall into a chain of those towers; the ones at Jinshanling 金山岭 and Badaling 八达岭 are his design, and the survey calls Linhai the blueprint for the wall foreigners know.

And then it became a customs post. After a peace with the Mongols in 1571 the passes opened markets; after the Qing 清, 17th to early 20th century united both sides of the wall in 1644 a new gate was cut at Zhangjiakou 张家口 for the caravan road to Mongolia and Russia, named a gate, not a pass. The wall spent its last two centuries collecting tax. The page keeps that story for its own section, because it is the one thing about the wall that nobody tells you.

03Beijing’s Wall: Restored, Original, Wild

Which section of the Great Wall near Beijing should you visit: Badaling, Mutianyu, Jinshanling, Simatai or Jiankou?

Six sections of the wall lie within two hours of Beijing, and they are three different experiences: rebuilt for crowds, left as the Ming 明, 14th to 17th century built it, or fallen in and free. Choose by which of the three you want, and by how far you are willing to walk.

Restored: Badaling 八达岭 and Mutianyu 慕田峪. Badaling, sixty kilometres out at the north mouth of the Juyong gorge 关沟, is the section every state visitor has climbed since Nixon in 1972 and every tour bus goes to; it is rebuilt to the last brick, safe, and crowded from mid-morning. Mutianyu, seventy kilometres out, is the same age and the same restoration with more trees, a cable car 索道 and fewer people, and the survey's pick for a first visit. Three to four hours each; booking advised.

Original: Jinshanling 金山岭 and Simatai 司马台. Jinshanling, a hundred and thirty kilometres north-east, is the survey's most intact Ming wall: sixty-seven towers of Qi Jiguang 戚继光's design, bricks stamped with the year and the battalion that fired them, and by the survey's estimate eight parts in ten of what you touch is Ming. It was braced in the nineteen-eighties, never rebuilt, and gets a tenth of Badaling's visitors. Simatai, five kilometres east and a hundred and twenty from the city, was never braced at all: the survey calls it the only section left in its Ming condition, a tower every hundred and fifty metres, one stretch with a parapet on one side and a cliff on the other, and the only section you can walk at night, since the resort town built at its foot in 2010 lights it. Cable car up; the lookout tower on the summit is nearly a thousand metres.

Wild: Jiankou 箭扣. Eight kilometres of collapsed wall on a ridge shaped like a drawn bow, thirty kilometres beyond Huairou 怀柔, no ticket, no rail, no stairs, and slopes the survey puts at eighty degrees on the stretch called the Eagle Flying Upside Down 鹰飞倒仰. It is the most photographed wall in China and the one that hurts people; go with a guide, in daylight, in dry weather, and give it four to six hours. Restoration has been creeping along it since 2005 on a principle of doing as little as possible.

And the gate the wall was built to guard. Juyongguan 居庸关, fifty kilometres out in the gorge below Badaling, has a rebuilt Ming fort from the nineteen-nineties around one genuine treasure: a stone arch of 1345 that once carried a Buddhist tower, carved inside with scripture in six scripts, two of them extinct. Beside it run the Ming wall, the railway of 1909 that was China's first built without foreign engineers, and the motorway. Two to three hours, no booking.

The honest order is Mutianyu for a first day, Jinshanling for a second, Simatai at night if you are staying out there, and Jiankou only if you walk mountains at home.

04The Two Ends: Sea and Desert

Where does the Great Wall begin and end, and what is the Han wall at Dunhuang?

The Ming 明, 14th to 17th century wall begins in the sea and ends in the Gobi, and beyond the Gobi an older wall goes on. The two ends are a day each, and the far end is the best place in China to see what the wall was before it was brick.

Shanhaiguan 山海关, where the wall walks into the water. Fifteen kilometres from Qinhuangdao 秦皇岛 and on the high-speed line from Beijing, the pass was founded in 1381 by the Ming's first general where the mountains come down to the Bohai Gulf 渤海 and leave eight kilometres of flat ground. Three things make the visit: the gate tower with the inscription "first pass under heaven 天下第一关," shelled in 1933 and rebuilt in the nineteen-fifties to its Ming pattern; the Old Dragon's Head 老龙头, where the wall runs out into the sea on a stone platform first built by Qi Jiguang 戚继光 in 1579 and rebuilt in the nineteen-eighties; and the section climbing Jiao Mountain 角山 behind, which is Ming and quiet. In 1644 the general holding this gate opened it to the Manchu 满族 army and ended the dynasty, and the survey tells that story at the gate. Three to four hours with the sea; booking advised on holidays. The walled town inside is on the old-town page.

Jiayuguan 嘉峪关, where the wall gives up. Six kilometres from the city of the same name, at the point where the Hexi corridor 河西走廊 narrows to fifteen kilometres between two ranges, a fortress founded in 1372 and finished in 1539 stands alone on the gravel with its inner and outer walls and gate towers complete, the best-preserved fortress on the Ming line by the survey's judgement. It was as much a customs house as a fort: caravans showed their papers and paid duty here, and envoys from the west waited for permission to go on to Beijing. Stand on the west wall at dusk and the next thing is the desert. Two to three hours.

Dunhuang 敦煌, where the older wall goes on. Ninety kilometres west of Dunhuang, reached only by car, the Han dynasty's Jade Gate 玉门关 is a rammed-earth fort ten metres high, put there around 110 BC to control the northern road to Central Asia and never rebuilt; it was inscribed with the Silk Road in 2014. Beside it, inside the same ticket, runs the Han wall 汉长城 itself: sand packed between layers of reed and red willow, beacon towers still standing, and stacks of signal fuel two thousand years old lying where the sentries left them, the oldest military signalling equipment surviving anywhere by the survey's claim. Seventy kilometres south, the southern gate at Yangguan 阳关 is a single Han beacon on a hill above dunes littered with old potsherds, a museum built in 2003, and a poem every Chinese schoolchild knows about leaving friends behind. Half a day for the two with the wall between.

The lesson of the ends is the material: brick at the sea, stone in the corridor, sand and reed in the desert. The wall was always built from whatever was underfoot.

05The Passes of the North

Which Great Wall passes in Shanxi and Hebei are worth visiting?

Between the two ends the wall crosses the mountains of Shanxi 山西 and Hebei 河北 through passes that each carry a battle, and it touches the Yellow River exactly once. Six places, none of them crowded, tell the wall's northern story.

Yanmen 雁门关, the pass the histories fought over most. Twenty kilometres above Daixian 代县 and a hundred and fifty from Taiyuan 太原, the gap in the Goujian range has, by the survey's count, a hundred and forty recorded battles: a Zhao general's ambush of the nomads in 265 BC, Han 汉, 2nd century BC to 3rd century AD armies marching out against the Xiongnu 匈奴, the Song 宋, 10th to 13th century general Yang Ye 杨业's victory of 980 that made his family a legend, and the palace woman Wang Zhaojun 王昭君 riding through in 33 BC to marry a chieftain. The fort is Ming 明, 14th to 17th century, of 1374, on a dramatic saddle. Two to three hours.

Niangzi 娘子关, the pass with a woman's name. In a gorge of the Taihang mountains forty kilometres from Yangquan 阳泉, the fort of 1541 is named for a Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century princess, Pingyang 平阳公主, who held the pass in 617 with a force the histories call the women's army, and who was buried six years later with military honours, the only princess to be. Waterfalls below the walls; under two hours.

Pingxingguan 平型关, a Ming pass and a 1937 ambush. A hundred and thirty kilometres from Datong 大同 in Shanxi, the pass of 1511 on the inner wall is visited today for the gorge below it, where on 25 September 1937 Chinese troops ambushed a Japanese column and won the first clear Chinese victory of that war, by the survey's account. The Ming wall is original; the memorial is modern and free.

Laoniuwan 老牛湾, where the wall meets the river. Forty kilometres from Pianguan 偏关 in the far north-west of Shanxi, a fort of 1467 and a hollow watchtower of 1636 stand on a cliff a hundred metres above the Yellow River's first bend into the province, the one point on the whole line where the Great Wall 长城 touches the river. The wall here is dry-laid limestone, no mortar, nothing like Beijing's brick. A boat is in the ticket.

Suoyang 锁阳城, a Tang city in the Gobi. Seventy kilometres from Guazhou 瓜州 and a hundred and seventy from Dunhuang 敦煌, a whole frontier city of the seventh century stands in rammed earth 夯土: inner wall, outer wall, a third wall for the horses, a temple ruin and the irrigation canals that fed the garrison's own fields. It was inscribed with the Silk Road in 2014 and the survey calls it the most complete Tang city defence in China. Car only; two to three hours.

And the oldest wall of all. Seventy kilometres from Jinan 济南, at Jinyang Pass 锦阳关, seven hundred and fifty metres of the wall the state of Qi 齐国 began around 685 BC still stand five metres high with their arrow slits, four centuries older than the First Emperor 秦始皇's, free and open. The legend of the widow who wept a wall down began here, the survey notes, before it moved north.

06The Wall as a Customs Post

Was the Great Wall used for trade?

For its last three hundred years the Great Wall 长城 collected tax. Four places on the northern line show the change from battlefield to market, and they are the part of the wall's story that never reaches a guidebook.

Zhenbeitai 镇北台, the biggest tower and the market beside it. Five kilometres north of Yulin 榆林, the largest watchtower on the whole wall by the survey's measure, thirty metres and four storeys, was built in fifteen months in 1607 to guard a walled market next door, the only official trading ground between Ming China and the Mongols after the peace of 1571. Tower and market sit side by side, war and trade in one frame, and almost nobody visits. An hour.

Dajingmen 大境门, the gate that is not a pass. At Zhangjiakou 张家口, eleven kilometres from the high-speed station, the Qing 清, 17th to early 20th century cut a new opening in the Ming 明, 14th to 17th century wall in 1644 and called it a gate, the only gate on the wall named that way, because its purpose was to let the caravans out. From here the tea road ran to Ulaanbaatar and on to Russia, and the survey records the silver that passed through in the hundreds of millions of taels. Above the arch a warlord governor of 1927 painted four characters, "great rivers and mountains 大好河山," that are still there. Free below; a small fee to climb.

Shahukou 杀虎口, the gate the migrants walked through. Thirty kilometres from Youyu 右玉 on the Shanxi 山西 side, the Ming called this pass Kill-the-Barbarians; in 1696 the Kangxi 康熙 emperor, having just fought the Mongols as allies, changed one character so that it read Kill-the-Tiger, and the name records a change of policy. Through it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries walked the Shanxi merchants and the millions of migrants of the movement called Going West 走西口, whose cart ruts are still cut in the old road. The gate tower is modern; the earth wall and the road are old. Free, two hours, with a free museum in Youyu.

And a pass that moved. The Han pass of Hangu 汉函谷关, thirty kilometres from Luoyang 洛阳, stands off the Great Wall and belongs with these: in 114 BC a general asked the emperor to shift the old Qin frontier gate three hundred li east so that his home would lie inside the pass, and paid for it himself. What stands is the Han earth platform with a brick tower of 1923 on top, two eras in one building, inscribed with the Silk Road in 2014 as the first pass west out of Luoyang. An hour.

What the four say together is that the wall's enemy changed. Once the horsemen were customers, the towers watched the caravans and the gates counted the silver, and the wall went on standing because it was still useful, as a border.

07The Passes Without Walls

What are Jianmen Pass and Tongguan, and why are they famous without a wall?

Two of China's most famous passes have almost no wall at all. They are places where the ground did the work, and the phrase every Chinese knows, one man at the pass and ten thousand cannot force it, was written about one of them.

Jianmen 剑门关, the gate of Sichuan 四川. Fifty kilometres from Guangyuan 广元 and fifteen from Jiange 剑阁, the road from the north into Sichuan squeezes through a gorge under cliffs of conglomerate three hundred metres high. In 229 the chancellor Zhuge Liang 诸葛亮 had a plank road built along the cliff face and a gate set in the gap; the holes his engineers cut for the beams are still in the rock, thirty centimetres across, and are the oldest thing at the site by a long way. In 263 a Shu general held the gorge with thirty thousand men against a hundred thousand by the survey's account, and the poet Li Bai 李白's line about one man holding the pass was written of it five centuries later. The gate tower itself has been destroyed three times in a lifetime, taken down for a road in 1935, rebuilt in 1992, burned in 2006 and shaken down in the 2008 earthquake, and the one standing is a design of 2009. Go for the gorge, the holes and the cliff path, and read the tower as the fourth attempt. Three to four hours, online booking, a combined ticket with the cypress-lined road beyond.

Tongguan 潼关, the gate of the Wei valley, mostly under water. Where the Yellow River turns east and the Hua mountains come down to meet it, five kilometres from the modern county town, a pass founded by Cao Cao 曹操 in 196 replaced the old Qin gate as the eastern door of the capital region and was fought over for eighteen centuries: the rebel who broke through in 756 took the Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century capital a week later, and the survey counts the battles down to 1644. In 1960 the old town was moved wholesale for the Sanmenxia 三门峡 reservoir and most of the pass went under the lake or under the bulldozer. What remains are fragments of Ming 明, 14th to 17th century and Qing 清, 17th to early 20th century wall on the hill and the shape of the river bend, free and unvisited, which the survey rates as worth an hour and a half precisely because it shows how many famous passes no longer exist.

Why they belong on a wall page. The Great Wall 长城 is the same idea at a bigger scale: put the barrier where the land already narrows and the enemy has to come to you. Jianmen and Tongguan are the idea with the wall left out, and after seeing them the brick near Beijing looks less like a monument and more like an argument about geography.

08The City Walls

Which Chinese cities still have complete city walls you can walk or cycle?

Eight Chinese cities still have their wall all the way round, and the best of them are a better afternoon than most palaces: you walk or ride the circuit, look down into the city, and read the bricks.

Xi'an 西安 is the one to ride. Fourteen kilometres around, twelve metres high, built between 1370 and 1378 on the foundations of the Tang 唐, 7th to early 10th century imperial city and faced with brick in 1568, it is the largest intact city wall in China by the survey's account and wide enough on top for a rented bicycle to do the loop in two to three hours. The ring park below it dates from 1983, when the city cleared the shanties from its foot. Lit at night.

Nanjing 南京 is the one to read. The Ming 明, 14th to 17th century founder's capital wall of 1369 to 1393 followed the hills and the river instead of a square, ran thirty-five kilometres, and lost ten of them to demolition in the nineteen-fifties and sixties; twenty-five survive, the longest city wall anywhere by the survey's claim. Every brick was stamped with the names of the kiln, the foreman and the county that made it, so that a bad brick could be traced, and you can read them by hand. The Gate of China 中华门 on the south side is a barbican of three courts inside one another, the largest in the country. Parts are free; the gate has a ticket.

Pingyao 平遥 is the one that comes with a town. Six kilometres of Ming brick from 1370 around a county seat that never outgrew it, seventy-two towers and three thousand crenellations arranged, the survey says, for the disciples and students of Confucius 孔子, six gates with their barbicans intact, and a walled town inside that is on the old-town page as one of the eleven best in the country. The town pass covers the wall; the high-speed station is eight kilometres out.

The other five, for people who collect walls. Jingzhou 荆州 in Hubei 湖北 has eleven kilometres of Qing brick of 1646 on a Ming base, with five soldiers' caves hidden inside the wall itself. Xingcheng 兴城 in Liaoning 辽宁 is the only complete Ming garrison town, a three-kilometre square of 1428 where in 1626 a Ming commander's European cannon wounded Nurhaci 努尔哈赤 and stopped him. Linhai 临海, the old prefecture city of Taizhou in Zhejiang, has five kilometres of wall founded in 402 where Qi Jiguang 戚继光 built his first hollow towers in the 1550s, and rounded barbicans that double as flood defences against the river. Xiangyang 襄阳 has the widest moat in China at two hundred and fifty metres by the survey's measure, a stretch built by women in 378, and the memory of the six-year Mongol siege of 1267 to 1273 that broke the Song 宋, 10th to 13th century. Ganzhou 赣州 in Jiangxi 江西 has the only Song brick wall left, laid between 1056 and 1063 above the meeting of two rivers, with five hundred and twenty-one kinds of dated brick inscription from the Song to the republic, and a drainage system of the same age still working under the town.

What to do on any of them is the same: go up at five, walk or ride until the light goes, and look at the roofs inside and the city outside. The wall is the one place in a Chinese city where you can see both at once.

09The Walls That Won

Where did the Mongols lose in China, and what are the tusi fortresses?

The Great Wall 长城 is famous for failing. Three fortresses in the south-west are the walls that held, one of them against the largest army in the world, and they are among the emptiest world heritage sites in China.

Diaoyucheng 钓鱼城, where a khan died. On a flat-topped hill above the meeting of three rivers at Hechuan 合川, an hour from central Chongqing 重庆 by bus, the Song 宋, 10th to 13th century built a fortress in 1243 on the advice of two brothers from Guizhou 贵州: hold the points, not the line, and put the garrison on a hill with its own fields and wells. The Mongols came in 1259 under the khan Möngke 蒙哥, and he died under the walls that summer, by the survey's account, which ended the Mongol campaign into the Middle East and Europe; a phrase the survey quotes calls the place where the whip of God was broken. The fortress held for thirty-six years and surrendered in 1279 only on a promise that nobody inside would be killed. The Song walls, gates, cliff walkways and the pits of the gunpowder works are still there. Three to four hours.

Hailongtun 海龙屯, the tusi's castle. Twenty kilometres north-west of Zunyi 遵义, on a cliff top reached by a stair of thirty-six giant steps cut into a forty-degree slope, stand nine gate-passes and the ruins of two palaces of the Yang family, who governed this corner of Guizhou as hereditary native chiefs 土司 for seven centuries from 876 and began the fortress in 1257 against the same Mongols. In 1600 the last of them defied the Ming 明, 14th to 17th century and a quarter of a million troops by the survey's count came up the mountain and burned it. It was inscribed in 2015 with the other native-chief sites and is, the survey says, one of the quietest world heritage sites in the country; the shuttle 观光车 to the foot of the stair is worth the fee.

Laosicheng 老司城, the tusi's capital. Nineteen kilometres from Yongshun 永顺 in the mountains of western Hunan 湖南, the Peng family ruled the Tujia 土家族 people for eight hundred years and thirty-five generations from 910, and their capital, occupied from 1135 until the court abolished the chiefs in 1724, survives as streets, wall and palace platforms in the forest: the left street for commoners and the right lanes for the chief's household, a plan the survey calls rare. One of the chiefs led five thousand of his people to the coast in 1555 to fight the pirates and came back with the empire's thanks. Inscribed in 2015; two to three hours with the museum.

Why they won and the Great Wall did not is in the first fortress's founding advice. A line can be crossed anywhere; a hill with water, fields and cliffs on three sides cannot be starved or stormed, and the enemy has to sit down in front of it and wait. The Mongols waited six years at Xiangyang 襄阳 and won; they waited at Diaoyucheng and lost a khan.

10The Walls That Faced the Sea

Where can you see the Opium War forts and the Beiyang fleet base?

The last walls China built faced the sea, and they lost. A Ming 明, 14th to 17th century harbour and three Qing 清, 17th to early 20th century gun batteries mark the century in which steamships made every wall on this page obsolete, and the survey is right that the modern country starts on these shores.

Penglai 蓬莱, the harbour that worked. On the tip of the Shandong 山东 peninsula, inside the ticket for the famous pavilion on the cliff above, a small artificial harbour with its sea gate, breakwater and walls has been a naval base since a Song 宋, 10th to 13th century squadron anchored there in 1042 and was walled by the Ming in 1376 against the pirates. Qi Jiguang 戚继光 trained his fleet here in 1553 before the coastal campaigns that made his name. It is, the survey says, the only ancient naval base in China still whole. An hour and a half.

Humen 虎门, where the opium was burned and the admiral died. At the mouth of the Pearl River below Guangzhou 广州, reached by high-speed train and bus, two pits of fifty metres a side hold the memory of June 1839, when the commissioner Lin Zexu 林则徐 destroyed more than two million catties of British opium in them by the survey's figure, and the forts on the headlands above hold the memory of 1841, when the Royal Navy's steamships came up the river and the admiral Guan Tianpei 关天培 died at his guns. The gun pits, tunnels and magazines are Qing; the museum explains the war without softening it. Free, with a real-name reservation, two to three hours.

Hulishan 胡里山炮台, the biggest gun. On the shore of Xiamen 厦门, a fort finished in 1894 keeps in its original emplacement a German coastal gun of two hundred and eighty millimetres, eighty-seven tonnes, the largest of its age surviving anywhere by the survey's citation, which fired in anger once, at a Japanese destroyer in 1937. The semi-underground gun positions and tunnels can be walked. A small ticket, ninety minutes, ten minutes from Gulangyu 鼓浪屿's ferry.

Liugong Island 刘公岛, where the fleet ended. Fifteen minutes by ferry from Weihai 威海, the island that closes the bay was the base of the Beiyang fleet 北洋海军, the largest navy in Asia when it was commissioned in 1888, with its admiral's headquarters, dry dock, forts and an iron pier of 1891 that ships still use. On 12 February 1895 the Japanese having taken the bay, the admiral Ding Ruchang 丁汝昌 took poison in his headquarters rather than surrender, and the fleet was gone. The ferry and the sites are one ticket; the museum is free. Three to four hours.

What the four teach is the argument of the whole page in reverse. The Great Wall 长城 worked because horsemen could not climb; the coastal wall failed because a ship with an engine could choose where to land, and no wall is long enough for that.

11The Family’s Wall

What are the Fujian tulou, the Kaiping diaolou and the Qiang villages?

The smallest walls on the page are the ones people still live behind. Three kinds of fortified home, in Fujian 福建, Guangdong 广东 and the mountains above Chengdu 成都, were built against bandits and neighbours, and they are the only fortifications in China where the visit is about the people inside.

The earth buildings 土楼 of Fujian. In the hills between Longyan 龙岩 and Zhangzhou 漳州, clans of Hakka 客家 and Minnan settlers from the seventeenth century onward built round and square houses of rammed earth 夯土 with walls a metre or two thick, one door, no windows on the ground floor, and the whole clan inside by rank around an ancestral hall in the middle. Forty-six of them were inscribed in 2008. The King of the Round Houses at Chengqi 承启楼, of 1709, is seventy-three metres across with four concentric rings and two hundred and eighty-eight rooms that once held eight hundred people, by the survey's count; the cluster at Tianluokeng 田螺坑, one square house and four round ones on a slope, is the photograph everyone has seen; a house of 1732 at Hegui 和贵楼 stands on a marsh on a raft of pine. Each cluster sells its own ticket, public transport is poor, and the survey allows one to two days by car from Xiamen 厦门. Families still live in most of them.

The tower-houses of Kaiping 开平碉楼. In the rice fields of the Pearl River delta west of Guangzhou 广州 stand, by the survey's count, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-three fortified towers of four to nine storeys, built between the eighteen-sixties and the nineteen-thirties by emigrants who had made money in California, Canada and Australia and sent it home to a district plagued by bandits and floods. The towers carry Greek columns, Roman arches and Islamic domes on Chinese roofs, copied from postcards, and the survey calls the district a museum of the world's architecture in one county. Inscribed in 2007, the first overseas-Chinese site to be. A two-day ticket covers the four villages; the tower at Zili 自力村 built in 1925 is the one from the film about a bandit and a governor. Three to four hours by car.

The stone village of the Qiang 羌族. A hundred and eighty kilometres north-west of Chengdu, two and a half hours by road, the village of Taoping 桃坪羌寨 is a labyrinth of stone houses joined by thirty-one tunnels and roof passages, with a channel of mountain water running under every house for drinking, fire and escape, and two watchtowers of ten storeys. The Qiang have farmed here since a county was founded in 111 BC, by the survey's account, and the old towers came through the 2008 earthquake standing when much around them fell. Two to three hours.

The wall and the life are two subjects. This page tells you why the walls were built and what they are made of; the old-town page, which lists the same three places, tells you who lives there now and how to visit without being a nuisance. Read both before you go.

12PreeChina, and What It Is Not

What does PreeChina arrange on the Great Wall and China's other walls?

• The wall is easy to reach and hard to choose. Choosing the section, the car and the guide for the wild parts is what we do.
• Beijing, by the kind of day you want. Mutianyu 慕田峪 for a first morning with a driver and an early start; Jinshanling 金山岭 with a picnic for people who want the Ming 明, 14th to 17th century brick under their hands; Simatai 司马台 after dark from the resort town for a night on the wall; Jiankou 箭扣 only with our mountain guide, in dry weather, for people who walk ridges at home. We do not send anyone to Jiankou alone and we do not book Badaling 八达岭 unless you ask.
• The two ends. Shanhaiguan 山海关 as a day from Beijing by high-speed train, with the Old Dragon's Head 老龙头 at low tide and the walled town on the old-town page for lunch. Jiayuguan 嘉峪关 folded into a Hexi corridor 河西走廊 trip with Dunhuang 敦煌, and from Dunhuang a car for the day to the Jade Gate 玉门关, the Han wall 汉长城 and Yangguan 阳关, which have no other way in.
• The passes of the north. A Shanxi 山西 week that takes Yanmen 雁门关, Laoniuwan 老牛湾 and Pingyao 平遥's wall in one loop, with Datong 大同's caves from the grottoes page and the wooden buildings from the page on old architecture; Zhenbeitai 镇北台 and Shahukou 杀虎口 for anyone who wants the trade story.
• City walls and family walls. A bicycle on Xi'an 西安's wall at five in the afternoon, booked with the tandem if you want it; two days in the Fujian 福建 earth buildings 土楼 by car from Xiamen 厦门 with a night inside one; Kaiping 开平碉楼 as a day from Guangzhou 广州. The coastal forts we fit into Xiamen, Weihai 威海 and Guangzhou days rather than build trips around them.
• What this page is not. It is not the old-town page, which has the towns inside the walls, Pingyao, Shanhaiguan, Jingzhou 荆州, Xingcheng 兴城, Linhai 临海 and the family walls, and the life in them. It is not the parks page, which has Badaling, Jiayuguan, Jianmen 剑门关 and Liugong Island 刘公岛 as places to spend a day. It is not the tombs page, though the tombs page's emperors built most of this. It is not a page of military judgement: where a wall lost, at Humen 虎门 or on Liugong Island or at Shanhaiguan in 1644, we tell what the survey records and leave the verdicts to the reader.
• The practical rules. Wild wall means a guide, boots, water, daylight and a weather check. Booking is advised for Badaling and Mutianyu and on holidays at Shanhaiguan, required online for Jianmen and for the Humen forts, which are free; the desert sites near Dunhuang need a car and have no shade. We check every rule the week you travel.