A valley with one purpose
North-west of Beijing the mountains close into a gorge about forty li long, and every road and railway to the north-west steppe has to go through it. The Chinese call it Guanchong, the pass channel. At its northern mouth sits Badaling; in the middle of it stands Juyongguan. The old military saying is that the difficulty of Juyong lies not at the pass but at Badaling, which is an accurate description of a layered defence: the gate is the gate, and the wall above it is the reason the gate could be held. We do them in that order, because that is the order they were built to be understood in.
Morning - Juyongguan and the Cloud Terrace
Juyongguan is older than the Ming walls around it; it guarded one of the eight great defiles from the太行 range down to the plain. Inside the pass is the Cloud Terrace, and it is the one thing here that
survives from the Yuan dynasty: it began as a gateway stupa, a tower with a passage through it, and what remains is the arched passage itself, lined with more than a thousand carvings, mostly Buddhist figures. The inscription inside carries the same text in six scripts - Tibetan, Uyghur, Sanskrit, Phags-pa, Tangut and Chinese - which is why it is studied as much by linguists as by historians, and why it is worth more of your morning than a longer queue elsewhere. The view from the wall above the pass is the one the Qianlong emperor named Juyong Green Ripples, one of the eight classical sights of Beijing.
Lunch
Lunch at the foot of the wall, before the afternoon walk.
Afternoon - Badaling
Badaling's gatehouse was begun in 1504, the seventeenth year of the Hongzhi reign. Its east gate carries a tablet reading "Outer District of Juyong", carved in 1539, and the west gate one reading "Key to the Northern Gate", carved in 1582; the two tablets are the best record of how the Ming saw the place. The wall is the most comprehensively restored and the most visited section in China, and we are direct about that: it will be busy. What it gives in exchange is the most complete surviving fabric of a defended pass, and the steepest, most legible section of open wall anywhere - 3,741 metres open to visitors, 1,176 metres going south and 2,565 going north, with sixteen watch platforms. The rampart averages 7.8 metres high and reaches fourteen metres in places, 6.5 metres wide at the base and about 5.8 at the top, which is why it feels like a road. Your guide walks you up the north side, explains the gatehouse and the garrison buildings on the way, and keeps the pace to what your group can actually do - most people turn around earlier than they expect.
Practical
Four to five kilometres of walking if you go to the end of the north section and back; the ascent is continuous and steep, with handrails in the worst places and no shade. Cable car and a pulley slide are available on the Badaling section and we usually use one of them. The drive each way is around ninety minutes outside peak traffic.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
