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No trip to Beijing, or in deed to China, would be complete without visiting the Great Wall. I went there in the summer of 2006. One thing that took me by surprise was the steepness of the climb. You see the pictures of the wall running across the mountain tops but what you forget is that they are mountain tops. To follow the wall from peak to peak you must go up and down the mountains. These can be precipitous.

When you think of China, you think of the Great Wall of China. The Wall has become iconic of the country. It has been said, “You haven’t been to China if you haven’t seen the Great Wall of China.” And in 1935, Mao Zedong famously said, “If we fail to reach the Great Wall we are not men.” This picture of the Great Wall of China was taken near to Badaling, just north of Beijing. This is by far the most popular tourist location on the Great Wall’s 6000km length. It is also the most heavily restored section of the wall. Much of what you see today is not the original wall, but the modern restoration. For most tourists, this is fine. They get to see the wall as it was and wonder at how it was constructed. However, if you walk up the mountains to the end of the tourist zone, you will find the view above. Here we can see the restored wall come to an end and leading into the distance is the original, unrestored, Great Wall of China. Signs warn tourists not to proceed any further and these should probably be heeded. By restricting tourists to the restored sections, we leave the other sections untouched. The should be left alone, undamaged.

At the entrance to one of the palace buildings in the Forbidden City in Beijing, two lions stand guard. Such lions are a common sight outside buildings all of China. However, these are not stone, but bronze.  One lion has a ball under this foot and the other has a cub. The ball represents the male lion and the cub, the female.