Near Yanmen Pass, Shanxi: 39°11'41" N, 112°48'30" E
“Do walls work?”
I am standing atop a stretch of “wild wall” in China’s Great Wall, which is to say, a remote and crumbling slice of the 13,000 miles of layered constructions that once defended ancient Chinese states from each other, and against the nomadic world of Eurasia. This particular run of fortifications near Yanmenguan, or “wild goose pass,” in central Shanxi Province, has not been restored for tourism. Its haunting, stone-sheathed ramparts are 25 feet tall and often broken and overgrown with dry grass. The bald, eroded ridgelines of the Hengshan range roll away like great brown vertebrae. My companion is Wang Wei, a professor of archaeology at Shanxi University. Wang is tireless as a mountain goat.
“Yes, I think walls work,” Wang replies, nearly shouting into the mouth of a gale blowing from Mongolia. “This one did, for many hundreds of years.”
“When I see a national wall,” I tell Wang, “I see policy failure.”
“Yes, I agree. That also can be true.”
I am walking across China. It is the 11th year of a longer global foot journey called the Out of Eden Walk. Guided by the advice of archaeologists, paleontologists, geneticists, and historians, I am retracing, on foot, the first corridors of human dispersal out of Africa during the Stone Age. Along the way, I try to examine current events through the prism of deep time; to analyze the origins of breaking news in the forgotten pediments of history. I have been walking since 2013 through an economically integrating but politically fracturing world. Something is shifting underfoot.
My own unoriginal observation, albeit garnered from the unusual perspective of boot level, plodding along at three miles an hour, suggests that while modern globalization, it is true, gave us Thai fusion cuisine and cheaper Nikes, it mostly has resulted in making elites and multinational corporations very rich. Goods may be moved freely. But people themselves, their dreams, are not globalized. Many of the more than 280 million souls who today live outside their countries of origin—a historic record—did not venture abroad from any sense of global fraternity. Stagnation, poverty (often induced by globalization), war, and climate crises at home shoved them. (Remember those obtuse predictions, years ago, that two countries with McDonald’s would never go to war?) Inasmuch as they give it any thought at all, the ordinary people I meet along my immensely long walking trail are frequently disillusioned at the state of the supposedly integrated world. And I am seeing walls rising everywhere.
Window through time: A guard tower on the "wild wall" section of the Great Wall in Shanxi Province looks out over the windblown steppes of Mongolia.
Paul Salopek
My friend Professor Wang, an expert on the Ming—the last dynasty that significantly upgraded the mighty Yanmenguan wall against armies of steppe horsemen in the 14th century—looks at things from the perspective of the dynamic but turbulent Sixteen Kingdoms period in China. During that time, between the fourth and fifth centuries, northern China was divided among smaller, energetic, constantly jockeying, and short-lived states that were often multicultural, incorporating proto-Turks, Mongols, Tibetans, as well as Han Chinese.
“Like a lot of times of turmoil,” Wang says, “life was exciting but difficult. Not easy. With the outside influences came rich exchanges. It’s like globalization today. It got everyone’s hopes up. But it causes upheaval too. It comes at a price. So we see openings and closings. People embrace the new, then withdraw. It’s cyclical. Maybe it’s like being a married couple. You reach a plateau in terms of benefits. And it’s not so exciting anymore. This is human.”
Wang clambers over the ruins of the wild wall.
He leads the way to a tiny aperture in the miles of forbidding masonry. This minute tunnel bored through the 30-foot-wide wall base is hidden and barely large enough to admit one person walking bent over. It was a secret exit and entry for scouts and spies.
“Outside!” Wang yells, laughing, his hair yanked sideways in cold winds, pointing toward Mongolia at the western opening of the tunnel. He pivots and points back to the hole. “Inside!”
A pore in the skin of empire.
Archaeologist Wang Wei inspects remnants of the Great Wall in remote Shanxi Province.
Paul Salopek
The first wall I encountered 11 years ago on my global walk was in the Rift Valley of Africa, at the poorly marked desert border between Ethiopia and Djibouti.
My Afar camel pastoralist guides and I were detained by the Djiboutian gendarmes after stumbling across the frontier illegally. My Afar friends had refused to believe my GPS on this matter. The angry border officers sent us tottering miles back through the devastating heat to get our passports pounded with an exit stamp at an Ethiopian guardpost.
I do not blame my herder walking partners.
Items sold by an army of sweating hawkers on one Ethiopian side of the border: njera buckwheat pancakes, Coca-Cola, tea, coffee, peanuts, candy, cellphone recharge cards, condoms in packets of two, cigarettes by the stick, beer, and bunches of narcotic qat leaves trucked in daily from the uplands.
Items sold by hawkers on the Djiboutian side: precisely the same products.
The “wall” between them was a bent water pipe boom raised and lowered across a sweltering highway by abusive guards. No other national barrier was visible, as far as the eyes could see, in the surrounding desert.
The border that governs the most powerful topography on the planet: the corrugations of the human mind.
Archaeologist Wang Wei inspects remnants of the Great Wall in remote Shanxi Province.
Paul Salopek
The first wall I encountered 11 years ago on my global walk was in the Rift Valley of Africa, at the poorly marked desert border between Ethiopia and Djibouti.
My Afar camel pastoralist guides and I were detained by the Djiboutian gendarmes after stumbling across the frontier illegally. My Afar friends had refused to believe my GPS on this matter. The angry border officers sent us tottering miles back through the devastating heat to get our passports pounded with an exit stamp at an Ethiopian guardpost.
I do not blame my herder walking partners.
Items sold by an army of sweating hawkers on one Ethiopian side of the border: njera buckwheat pancakes, Coca-Cola, tea, coffee, peanuts, candy, cellphone recharge cards, condoms in packets of two, cigarettes by the stick, beer, and bunches of narcotic qat leaves trucked in daily from the uplands.
Items sold by hawkers on the Djiboutian side: precisely the same products.
The “wall” between them was a bent water pipe boom raised and lowered across a sweltering highway by abusive guards. No other national barrier was visible, as far as the eyes could see, in the surrounding desert.
The border that governs the most powerful topography on the planet: the corrugations of the human mind.
The walled ruins of a Ming dynasty temple loom over the Yellow River near the village of Mahuaping, in central China.
Paul Salopek
Professor Luo Xin, an eminent historian and writer at Peking University, in Beijing, came across the following exchange buried in the imperial archives of China.
It is a conversation that echoes down to us between Han soldiers patrolling atop the Great Wall (the tops of the Chinese battlements were often designed to support an elevated roadway that was 10 soldiers or five horsemen wide) and a lone rider who approaches the vast fortification from the grassy stronghold of the Mongol steppes:
Are you coming to spy on us? the soldiers call down to the interloper.
Yes, shouts back the horseman. I am here to look for weaknesses for our next attack.
Hey! You sound Han, not Mongolian! the startled soldiers reply.
That’s correct. I am treated much better on this side!
“The idea that the Great Wall was this hard barrier between peoples is false,” says Luo. “There were Mongols farming on the Chinese side and Han trading on the Mongol side. It was complicated.”
In other words: Walls may try to hem in human identity. But they fail.
Walking years ago from the West Bank into Israeli-controlled Jerusalem, I encountered the infamous Separation Barrier.
This structure is an imposing wall 26 feet high, made of solid concrete slabs, that snakes between Palestinian and Israeli territories. It can be seen easily by satellite. Its surface is densely slathered with angry graffiti—with signs and curses, with poems and taunts, with cries—with portents. It was built to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out of Israel after the Second Intifada.
“They put up the wall here in one single day in 2003,” Claire Anastas, a Christian resident of nearby Bethlehem, told me. Her house straddled the territorial dividing line. She refused to budge. So the Israeli government erected the massive walls around three sides of her modest home, within touching distance of her windows. “The children went to school in the morning, and when they came back they found the house surrounded,” Anastas said.
“You!”
The voice buzzed over an intercom at the barrier checkpoint. I stood next to a metal detector. No human being was visible. Puzzled, I glanced around.
“Yes, you!”
“Where are you?” I asked. “I can’t see you.”
“Behind you! Behind the glass! What is in the pack?”
“Laptop, video camera, audio recorder, satellite phone … ”
“Where do you come from?”
“Ethiopia.”
“No! Where do you come from?”
“United States.”
“Welcome to Israel.”
Tourists crowd the streets of Ping Yao, a walled 14th-century town in Shanxi Province that was a major financial center. Work crews are digging up the old brick lanes to substitute more “authentic” stone paving.
Paul Salopek
Before taking me to the wild wall, the archaeologist Wang Wei joins me in Ping Yao, an exceptionally beautiful and well-preserved historic town built in Shanxi Province in the 14th century. Work crews are digging up the old brick lanes to pave them with more “authentic” stone paving. Shops sell ice cream. Some businesses rent Ming dynasty costumes for tourists to walk around in. The tourists take selfies in mufti—including delicate parasols—with their cell phones.
The town was a major financial center during the Ming and Qing dynasties. It is surrounded, as most ancient cities are in China, by high walls.
On foot, you see walls everywhere in China. In the case of Ping Yao, they consist of high stone palisades that include six gates, four towers, 72 watchtowers, and 3,000 battlements, the latter symbolizing the 3,000 students of Confucius.
“In ancient China, people were the main resource,” says Wang Wei. “Farmers came from the people. Soldiers too. Control the people, and you controlled everything.”
As we stroll out of the town via its maze of narrow lanes, walking under its wall’s north gate, Wang goes on:
“For thousands of years, this was the Chinese universe. Thousands of years of lives unfolding in the streets. This wall? It was the edge of the known universe. Beyond it? Nothing.”
An ancient, wild stretch of China’s Great Wall on the edge of the Mongolian steppes offers lessons about divides in our modern world.
Out of Eden Walk
Time is a wall. Maybe life is too.
I walk onward with my Chinese walking partners.
We pass lines of skinny, white-barked, leafless poplars arrayed like picket fences. In villages, painted slogans exhort us from the walls of government buildings: Light a fire. Go to Jail! And, Kudos to local banks—deposits surpass 16 billion renminbi. And, New ideas. New vision. New leader. From the high, ocher walls of the cliffs holding the Yellow River, booming explosions echoed where construction crews extended a railroad line.
I will never forget the village of Mahuaping. We trek through its silent streets in the gloaming of dusk. It has no visible walls.
It is a typical outpost of rural central China, situated on the Loess Plateau. Many of the homes are very old: hand-tunneled caves called yaodong. Their beautiful, filigreed window frames are cracked because almost all the houses are abandoned. Exchanged for high-rises in the cities. We see wattle-stick granaries. There are old millstones—wheels of granite—toppled in the weeds. The jujube orchards have gone half wild. All of it will be gone in 20 or 25 years. Gone and forgotten.
“Who are you?” a suspicious granny calls after us from her doorsill. “What are you doing here?” She is marooned here. Perhaps she is the last resident.
Ruth, where are you? I say out loud to myself, walking onward, thinking of my people, those who have gone before, passing through some wall. And without breaking stride, I wave.
