I see the real Great Wall of China
I'm reporting from Ningxia Province, China. It's 1,000 miles west of the coast, has a big ethnic minority called the and is strongly Muslim. Oh, and the Great Wall runs through here, snaking casually alongside to you as you drift in and out of sleep on a deserted motorway.
It slinks around mile-wide coal processing plants and then leaps out at you in the low sunlight. It is quite unlike the brick-built Great Wall in all those "shouting dramas" you see on Chinese TV. It is in fact made of clay. Every 500m or so there are the remains of a bastion which was also clay. There are no signs, no tour guides, not much physical protection (sheep grazing is banned here for reasons of ecology, not archaeology).
On the hilltops surrounding there is always a clay fortress to overlook the walls. People are farming sheep in the shadow of the wall, swallows live in it and in one case, right by the motorway, shepherds are living inside the wall. In one city I saw shacks had been built right up against the wall itself.
The real Great Wall is craggy: a Nicaraguan might mistake it for the side of an arroyo - a natural serration of the earth. If you ever squeezed damp sand at Blackpool between the palms of your hands and made a wall, that's what this looks like, only about 20 ft high.
It is eerie and beautiful, having been sculpted by the forced labour of hundreds of thousands of peasants and overrun by tens of thousands of nomadic horsemen, then allowed to decay under the Cultural Revolution. The Wall defeated all comers.
The plains on either side are empty, desertified despite the attempts of the local environmentalists to replant them, and gauntly beautiful. I was thinking, God this farmland looks poor, and then realised I was looking at the margins of a desert.
Anyway the results of today's reporting will be conveyed in later blogs and reports on Newsnight. It will be about a halal slaughterhouse and the aspirations of its Chinese workforce.
But: sometimes a mental image is so strong it just tells its own story. For the Great Wall the story is half a millennium long. That crumbling, caramel coloured dragon is going to haunt my dreams.
Comment number 1.
At 15th May 2009, shireblogger wrote:I know I'm off piste but see Tracy Corrigan's piece in The Telegraph today about banks cashing in on QE / gilt purchases by BoE and gilt market distortions. Shenanigans etc. this end......
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Comment number 2.
At 15th May 2009, bookhimdano wrote:have they been putting something in your tea?
I'm not a Nicaraguan. Mistaken or otherwise. [so i probably need more Norf Lundun references]. Mosquito coast. Where once the British ruled and where, today, mansions are mysteriously replacing huts. Now that is what i call exotic.
i love how the britishness comes out regarding that 'it isn't protected'. Only the Brits have made preserving things of no further use a religion. A weird form of materialist philosophy that seeks to pretend that the eternal is thus preserved. Wasn't the reason the chinese didn't dig up the rest of the terracotta burial site because they did not want to invoke the wrath of the emperor? Maybe its the same with the wall and forts. Bad magic to tamper?
Paul You missed the compo designed to re educate us. but you deserve a bit of luck.
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Comment number 3.
At 16th May 2009, Jericoa wrote:The great wall is a powerful symbol and more, like the pyramids, machu pitchu, stone henge, the Taj Mahal, the Palace of Westminster.
The struggle and spent lives in their creation are made real, built into the mud or cut stone or brick by gnarled, cut, bruised and bloodied hands by the power of will.
That is why there is a common desire to preserve these things and protect them, they are 'sacred' in a non religious sense and there is a deep sense of revulsion at their destruction, especially by a dogma of any kind (think of the Taleban blowing up the ancient Buddha statues).
Their lies in part a sense of the growing deep outrage here over the 'expenses'. As cromwell said in 1643 'you have defiled this sacred place'.
The symbol of the Palace of Westminster and more importantly the great struggle that built it is being defiled defore our very eyes.
I am glad it has been exposed in this way, the anger will grow, it has something that the financial crises does not have. The masses can understand easily that paying for an MP's christmas decorations on expenses is utterly removed from the experience of the voters of this country and an insult to the struggle upon which the Palace of Westminster was built.
What next, well, the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s expenses maybe?
For me the ´óÏó´«Ã½ was the modern media equivalent of the palace of westminster and has been defiled in the same way in the recent past. I wonder what Jonathan Ross or Robert Pestons expenses look like? Can we ask for them under freedom of information as well?
Do you want to be the first to post yours on the net ahead of the curve Paul?
Keep your reciepts for the room with cigarette burns in the matress and chairs :).
The MP's expenses crises seems to be gathering momentum and be on the verge of being expressed in a very real and important way at the ballot box.
The comming EU and Local elections may prove to be the most important for some time...I hope so. I also hope that the ´óÏó´«Ã½ rediscovers a fire in its belly for genuine courageous political and financial investigative reporting as the daily telegraph has.
In so doing it would go a little way towards redemption as an organisation that is paid for by the people who are falling on increasingly difficult times. The people will not mind paying for a politically independant media organisation acting in the public interest who makes the odd mistake, but not for one acting on the shallow shifting whirlpool of our desires and fearful of the powerbrokers of the day. The organisation changed following the 45 minute claim and the Dr David Kelly affair.
´óÏó´«Ã½ take note what is happening to the palace of westminster, remember what you were created to be as well, be ahead of the curve.
Keep up the good work Paul...and keep your receipts:)
Jericoa
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