A city that mostly is not there any more
Beijing's inner city wall was begun in 1419, the seventeenth year of the Yongle reign, and ran about twenty-five kilometres around the capital. Almost none of it remains. What survives is one stretch of about a kilometre and a half on the east side, between Chongwenmen and the south-east corner tower, kept by accident rather than design - the ground was requisitioned during the construction of the main railway station in 1958 and the wall was never cleared. In 2002 the surrounding buildings were demolished and the strip became the Ming City Wall Relics Park. Walking it is therefore not a tour of a monument but a look at an escape.
Morning - the wall and its corner
We walk the surviving rampart from west to east, reading the fabric: the length of intact wall that kept its original height, the stretches reduced to a low bank, the brick buttresses that projected at intervals to give defenders flanking fire, and a brick archway cut through the wall in 1915 for a railway. At the east end is the south-east corner tower, begun in 1436 in the first year of the Zhengtong reign. It is the largest surviving city-corner tower in China and it now sits alone at the junction, which is precisely what makes it legible - you can see how a corner tower closes two runs of wall, and why the defender's problem at a corner is different from the problem along a straight.
Lunch
A simple lunch nearby, then a short walk north along the line of the vanished east wall.
Afternoon - the Ancient Observatory
The observatory stands almost exactly where the wall once ran, because it was built on top of it. It dates from 1442, the seventh year of the Zhengtong reign, and its astronomical lineage reaches back further: in 1279 the astronomers Wang Xun and Guo Shoujing had set up an observing platform just to its north. The brick platform is about fourteen metres high, roughly twenty by twenty-four metres at the top, and it carries eight large bronze instruments made in the Qing period - six of them cast under the Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest between 1669 and 1674, one more in 1715, and a final one in 1744 for the Qianlong emperor. Taken together they are a document of exchange: Chinese forms and decoration, European graduation and mounting. The station observed continuously for nearly five hundred years, to 1929, which makes it one of the longest unbroken observational records of any observatory in the world, and it is still the oldest surviving one.
On the walk
Roughly four to five kilometres in total, entirely flat, along pavement and through a park. The wall walk has no railing on the outer edge in places and the corner tower's stairs are steep, so it is not suitable for very young children or for anyone unsteady on stairs; tell us in advance and we will restructure the day around the observatory instead.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
