Dr. Mark Nan Tu

The team building event at the foot of the mountain

The unrepaired section of the wall was build in the Ming dynasty

JiuGuKou is located in HuaiRou district, some 80km north of Beijing. This is a state park which offers dense forest and Great Wall remains from the Ming dynasty. The HuaiBei ski resort is at the foot of the mountain. The resort is used as the out door playground for many company employees for team building events during the summer.

A hike from the park entrance to the Great wall takes about an hour. When I reached the top, I could notice the odd shape of a watch tower. Most of the watch towers along the Great wall are square shaped. This particular watch tower, however, is rectangular shaped. Why this watch tower is has this odd shape? After careful examination of the structure, I found the answer. This tower was building on a rather narrow strip of the mountain range. The foundation of the tower is a rectangular in shape. Thus the watch tower has to be built with the shape to fit the foundation.

This section of the wall is unrepaired. The remains of the wall stretched along the mountain ranges and disappeared into the horizon.

Walking on the unrepaired section of the Wall is a unforgettable experience

The rectangular shaped watch tower

The entrance to the JiuGuKou Great Wall park

General Qi Ji Guang’s scuplture and the Huangyaguan Great Wall what he helped to build

The Qi Dynasty Wall is build with stones and the Ming Dynasty Wall is build with bricks

The Huangyaguan Great Wall

Impenetrable, dangerous, old and beautiful are some of the words to describe the Huangyaguan Great Wall. We started off from Beijing early in the morning and arrived at the Huangyaguan Great Wall’s just in time just for lunch. There were many restaurants to choose from. We were taken by the warmness of a host of a courtyard. I was not expecting much from the food. But it turned out to be much worse than I thought. The foot was badly prepared and the service was horrible, the tables were very dirty. I guess they just do not care of the customers are there are plenty of them coming every day and very few will ever return here.

Finished eating the food, we hired a tractor for 10 Yuan to send us to the summit. After that, it was 3 kilometers walk on the Great Wall down to the foot of the mountain. The Huangyaguan Great Wall was first build in the Qi Dynasty in the (700AD) and was heavily repaired in the Ming Dynasty. The Qi dynasty wall was build with stones and the Ming dynasty Walls were build with distinctive bricks. Walking along the Wall we could see sections of Great Wall were piled up with rocks and others with bricks.

Coming down the Great Wall, we visited a