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www.iht.com The Great Wall has been a symbol of China and a structure of near mythological stature ever since it was marked on the first European map of China in 1584. But almost no one outside China had actually seen what it looked like until Victorian-era adventurers began to photograph it.
Taking such pictures was not easy. When the pioneering Scottish photographer John Thomson set out in 1871, it took him two days just to travel the 70-odd, or about 45 miles, kilometers from Beijing to the Great Wall at Badaling — with eight mules to carry his camera equipment. He had to process his photos immediately on glass negatives in a tent that served as a mobile darkroom.
The images captured by Thomson and other early photographers caused a sensation among those Westerners who saw them.
"It was like us going to a lecture and seeing photos of Mars or Venus," explained William Lindesay, curator of the Beijing Capital Museum's new photo exhibition, "The Great Wall Revisited: From the Jade Gate to Old Dragon's Head," which opened on Jan. 5 and runs to Feb. 25.
"The distance traveled to get the picture was out of the realm of possibility for most people, who would probably travel only a few thousand miles in their lives. Gradually, the pictures got forgotten as people got on planes."
Although Lindesay himself is a Great Wall expert and preservationist — he trekked along the Great Wall for 2,470 kilometers in 1987, stopping only because he was deported, and subsequently founded International Friends of the Great Wall — he was largely unaware of these early photos until 1990. That year he spoke of his adventures on BBC Radio and a listener sent him a book written by the American missionary and explorer William Edgar Geil, who traversed the length of the Great Wall between 1907 and 1908.
Geil's photo-filled account is a paean to the Great Wall, which he saw as "designed to preserve peace ... The builder even two thousand years ago was ahead of the senseless militarism of Europe. Warful nations have disappeared but the peaceful Chinese continue through the millenniums." Lindesay was immediately enamored with Geil whom he sees as the founder of Great Wall studies and a kindred spirit. He was especially struck by a shot of a section of the Wall called Mule Horse Pass.
"I realized I had been there, but the tower was gone."
Lindesay spent the next decade seeking out early photographs of the Great Wall and gradually amassed a considerable collection, including images taken by Thomson and Geil. But the missing tower continued to haunt him and on Dec. 31, 2000, alone on a Great Wall silhouetted by murky light pollution from Beijing, he resolved to find all the places in his collection and rephotograph them in order to document their changes.
"These pictures have decisive moments suspended in time," he explained. "Rephotography actually links the past and the present, like two frames of a movie."
Thus was born the current exhibition (co-organized by International Friends of the Great Wall and the Beijing Administration of Cultural Heritage) in which 72 old photographs are paired with 72 rephotographs, the images together presenting a record of desecration and preservation, ruin and endurance.
The original photographs were taken between 1871-1937 during what Lindesay calls "a golden period, before the Wall was damaged by the Sino-Japanese war, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution." They cover the length of the Wall, from the desert in the west (the Jade Gate) to where it meets the sea in the east (Old Dragon's Head). With one exception, the photographs were all taken by foreigners.
"Photography was a science invented in the West. There may have been a few photographers in China, but not many."
The rephotographs demonstrate the unsurprising fact that the passage of time, the tragedies of history, and the pressures of population and development have not been kind to the Great Wall. A section photographed by the archaeologist Aurel Stein in Gansu Province around 1910 was then unbroken for seven miles, but Lindesay found that it is now crossed by "two rail lines, 17 power lines, the west to east gas line, 15 dirt roads, one main road, an abandoned main road and the G-312 expressway — which is actually routed under the Wall."
When he set out to find an undulating section of Ming Dynasty Wall with four watchtowers about which Geil had rhapsodized, he was shocked to find that the towers were all gone.
"Geil writes that words do not do it justice, you must sit for hours and watch it — and now it's just leveled."
When confronted with such deterioration — or destruction — Lindesay interviewed elderly locals about the cause. In the case of the vanished towers, he was variously told that they had been sabotaged by Chinese soldiers so the Japanese couldn't use them; that they had been bombed by the Japanese because Chinese gunners were using them; and that Japanese soldiers had forced the Chinese villagers to dismantle them because the Wall was a symbol of China.
Examining the ruins himself — and the houses made of Great Wall bricks in which some of his informants lived — he guessed that the Wall had been dismantled. These mini-oral histories are included in the exhibition, as is a short film that documents Lindesay's efforts to find the exact spots for rephotographing — a process he likens to "finding a needle in the sea, as the Chinese say" — and greatly enhance the photographic record. (The publication of English and Chinese editions of Lindesay's book "The Great Wall Revisited: An Image History of the Wall" by China Intercontinental Press was also timed to coincide with the exhibition.)
In the "golden period" when early Great Wall photographs were taken, the Wall had almost no visitors. Today, it receives roughly 10 million visitors a year, with most of these going to the Badaling section, which on one peak October day received 119,000 visitors. The sheer magnitude of these numbers is brought home in the exhibition by the pairing of an 1880 photo showing the empty Wall at Badaling snaking through pristine wilderness and the rephotograph in which the same section is so mobbed with tourists that you can barely see the Wall itself.
"At the beginning I was depressed," acknowledges Lindesay. "I felt pessimistic about what I saw. But, at the end of 2½ years, I felt better. Many places have been rebuilt — because nature will destroy the Wall if man doesn't. I support more rebuilding. And the rebuilding is much better quality. They aren't just slapping bricks together; they are mixing mortar according to ancient recipes."
Lindesay is further heartened by the enactment on Dec. 1, 2006, of China's first nationwide law for protecting the Great Wall. The law bans such common activities as carving names into its bricks, removing them to build pigsties and outhouses, or holding all-night rave parties that leave the Wall littered with trash and reeking of urine. An Inner Mongolian construction company has already been fined 500,000 yuan, or $63,776, the steepest amount possible under the new law, for tearing down a section of Wall that was in its way.
"There has been encouraging progress on Great Wall conservation, but it's still a tremendous challenge," concludes Lindesay. "This [photo] collection is a summary of success and failure. I hope that those who have the unenviable task of preserving the Wall can gain some guidance." | 
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