Tourists to the Great Wall of China more often than not get a decidedly modern view of the ancient structure, walking along stretches rebuilt and repaved to handle millions of visitors every year.
But a battle-scarred section in the historic garrison town of Zhangjiakou, 180km north-west of Beijing, is one of the first to allow visitors to walk next to the ancient edifice in its natural state.
The Great Wall’s Dajingmen Gate is being restored for tourism, but unlike other tourist sites along the wall, it has been left largely in its natural state of decay.
“In the Zhangjiakou region, archaeologists have found remnants of the Great Wall dating to the Qin Dynasty over 2Â 200 years ago,” Chang Jingzhong, head of the Zhangjiakou cultural affairs bureau, told Agence France-Presse.
“There are also parts of the wall built in successive dynasties afterwards including the Han, Northern Wei, Tang, Jin, Ming and Qing Dynasties.
“This is why we call Zhangjiakou a Great Wall Museum.”
A new park along the Taiping Mountain Range above the west side of the Dajingmen Gate allows tourists to climb along several kilometres of tree-covered pathways next to the crumbling wall in varying states of disrepair.
The park is the answer to increasing demands by Great Wall enthusiasts and tourists who have longed to be able to visit the ancient wall in a natural state, but who have also feared that increasing tourist traffic will further erode the structure.
“The Dajingmen Gate is the symbol of Zhangjiakou, so we are trying to preserve the historic record as best we can, while also making it accessible to tourists,” Chang said.
“The gate itself once marked China’s northern border and largely dates to the early Ming Dynasty [about 1368], but was rebuilt again during the Qing Dynasty in 1546.”
The gate is one of the four major historic passes along the Great Wall, and was the first gate in a line of defences protecting the capital from Mongolian and other armies north of China.
Although the gate and a stretch of the wall in Zhangjiakou city proper are being renovated, the wall on the Taiping Mountain ridge has been largely spared of the rebuilding that other Great Wall tourist sites have undertaken.
The Juyongyuan Gate, just outside Beijing near the ever popular Badaling Great Wall, has been massively rebuilt as one of the wall’s great gates and was once the second line of the capital’s defence after the Dajingmen.
The other two great gates are Shanhaiguan, also known as the “Old Dragon’s Head”, where the eastern-most end of the Great Wall falls into the Bohai Sea, and the Jiayuguang Gate to the west, where the wall disappears into the deserts of Gansu province.
Although the distance between Shanhaiguan to Jiayuguang is nearly 1Â 600km as the bird flies, the actual wall is estimated to be over 6Â 000km long as it winds back and forth along mountain ridges.
Zhangjiakou, often referred to in history books by its Mongolian name of Kalgan, is situated in a strategic pass that competing armies have fought over for several millennia.
The earliest known war is known as the Battle of Zhuolu, when the legendary Yellow Emperor is believed to have defeated warring tribes at about 2Â 600 BC and set up China’s first-ever capital in present-day Zhuolu county inside Zhangjiakou prefecture.
Wars continued to be fought in the Zhangjiakou region before and after the Qin Dynasty built the first Great Wall 2Â 200 years ago.
“Over 50 major wars have been fought along the Great Wall at Dajingmen, while the number of smaller military confrontations are countless,” said Yan Yuguang, vice-head of Zhangjiakou’s cultural relics bureau.
It was near here in 1211 that Mongolian conqueror Genghis Khan toppled the Jin Dynasty when he routed up to 400Â 000 soldiers just outside the Great Wall.
Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai Khan, the first emperor of China’s Yuan Dynasty, regularly passed through the Dajingmen Gate area on his way back to Mongolia and to his summer retreat of Zhongdu in the grasslands just north of Zhangjiakou.
It was also from Zhangjiakou that the Qing Emperor Kangxi began his military expeditions to the north that decimated Mongolian armies and resulted in China’s annexation in 1635 of Inner Mongolia, which remains a part of China today.
In between all the wars, Zhangjiakou became a garrisoned trading town with Mongols trading tea from China for furs and horses in a huge marketplace just outside the Dajingmen Gate.
When Russia became the first nation to win formal trading rights with the Qing Dynasty in the late 17th century, Zhangjiakou became the starting point of the “Great Tea Route” that supplied both Mongolia and Russia with Chinese goods.
In the most recent battles, united troops from the Soviet Union and Mongolia clashed with occupying Japanese troops along the Great Wall in 1945, very near to the spot where Genghis Khan defeated the Jin armies centuries before.
In 1948, communist armies marched into Zhangjiakou after defeating their Nationalist rivals in China’s civil war.
Since the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, Zhangjiakou remained a garrison town through the Cold War and was only opened to overseas tourism in 1995 when it was declared an “open city”.
Today the city hopes to develop its tourist potential, but in a way that mirrors its historical past.
“The development of the Dajingmen Gate … needs to be done with utmost respect for the historical record and renovations should be made strictly in accordance with them,” Dong Yao, vice-head of the China Great Wall Society, told Xinhua news agency last month.
“We must preserve to the utmost extent existing cultural relics and if something can be preserved as it is then it should be preserved. Only in this way can modern people of today have a dialogue with the peoples of the past.” — AFP