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By Root 1242 0

to inform us of the wonders of traditional Chinese medicine, and that here, right now, were world-class specialists who could help us, today, now, diagnose our ailments and provide the treatment garnered from a 3,000-year tradition of medical knowledge. In came the doctors, looking very doctor-like, and soon my fellow tourists were lining up for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be seen by the World’s Very Greatest specialists in this area. Strangely, I did not see any Chinese people lining up for a consultation with the superstars of traditional Chinese medicine. As it turned out, the young among us were all suspiciously healthy. But if you happened to be a middle-aged man with an inner tube of a gut and a florid expression, oh dear. There were gallbladder problems. Kidney issues. And the liver? Best not to ask. Fortunately, there were cures. And there was a traditional pharmacy right here on the premises, available now to fill orders for powdered gingerroot and the crumbled leaves of a birch tree.

David of Kansas, I was pleased to see, did indeed have an open mind when it came to other cultures, and he returned to the bus with five bags of powder and an ashen expression. I could not bring myself to see the doctor, since I’m highly susceptible to the power of suggestion, and I feared precisely what had befallen him—he who now knew that the welfare of his colon depended entirely on the consumption of eggshells from the red-bellied swiftlet, found only in the high mountains of Sichuan.

At last we moved on to Badaling, one of the most well-preserved sections of the wall. It is indeed a very great wall, this Great Wall of China. Richard Nixon said so himself. “I think that you would have to conclude that this is a great wall,” he said when he visited Badaling in 1972. Unsurprisingly, one doesn’t find Nixon’s ringing endorsement of the wall in the Chinese government’s marketing literature. Instead, what you find is this:

The Great Wall is not only the magnum opus of human being but also the soul of China!

The soul of China! The magnum opus of human being!

They sure do know how to bring in a crowd, I thought as I joined, I don’t know, perhaps a million, possibly 2 million, visitors jostling among stalls and carts selling trinkets and postcards on the edge of the parking lot. There were camel rides and donkey rides and immense lines for the cable cars bringing people up to the Great Wall itself. Badaling is the place where the wall becomes a spectacle, a place where dare-devils leap over the wall on skateboards and motorcycles. Upon its stone ramparts were vast crowds and innumerable beggars; the restored guardhouses smelled like urine, and it wasn’t long before I began to wonder what, exactly, I was doing there.

If you come to China without climbing the Great Wall, just as well you come to Paris without visiting the Iron Tower!

So true. And so I climbed farther. As I made my way through the swarming crowds, I resolved to stop being such a cupcake, that it was time to forgo the tour buses, because I could see nothing of China through the teeming masses of tourists. I followed the worn stones past the refreshment stands, up and over the steep inclines, until at last the crowd had dribbled to the last outliers, and finally I could see, really see, this Great Wall of China.

It cascaded over rugged mountains—indifferent to cliffs, unimpressed by summits, impervious to obstacles—as it spilled into the distance, a jagged stone snake uncoiling across China. No one seems to know quite how long the Great Wall really is. Some say it’s 4,500 miles long; others that it’s a more modest 1,500 miles. The true scope is unknown, because they are still finding parts of it; in 2001 and 2002, another 360 miles of the Great Wall revealed itself. But surely, you think, measuring the length of the Great Wall must be a straightforward thing to do. Simply start at one end—say, its eastern terminus near North Korea—and keep walking until you reach the other end. But the Great Wall of China, it turns out, is not one long continuous wall of