William Lindesay - Wild Wall-The Jiankou Years

Also by William Lindesay

Wild WallThe Foundation Years

Great Wall, Beautiful Jade: My China Loves

The Great Wall in 50 Objects

The Great Wall Explained

The Great Wall Revisited

Images of Asia: The Great Wall

Marching with Mao: A Biographical Journey

Alone on the Great Wall

Wild WallThe Jiankou Years

By William Lindesay

ISBN-13: 978-988-8769-74-2

2022 William Lindesay

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY

EB156

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Published by Earnshaw Books Ltd. (Hong Kong)

To James Lindesay and Thomas Lindesay

Samuel Johnson tried to persuade James Boswell, with whom he toured the Hebrides, to go to China to walk the Great Wall, despite concerns about leaving behind his children. Johnson argued that the benefits of the journeyan enlarged mind and acquisition of dignity of characterwould more than compensate for his long absence, and raise his children to eminence, reflect a lustre of spirit and curiosity in them and distinguish them as children of a man who had gone to view the Great Wall of China.

Jim and Tommy: many of the stories in this book recount your foundation years at the Wallas early risers, inquisitive historians, animated guides, ardent conservationists and accomplished documentary filmmakers. Over two decades, along the thousands of kilometres of the Great Walls ways that we have travelled together, I have realised that Wall fever (in the words of Alfred Wainwright) is not only an affliction that is a healthy and rewarding pursuit, but might actually be hereditary. The condition has reached new heights through your own desires to measure the Wall with your own footsteps. I look forward to being distinguished as the father of men who have also gone on foot along the Great Wall of China. All for Wall!

Who are we if we cannot reach the Great Wall?

Mao Zedong, 1935

Who are we if we cannot cherish the Great Wall?

William Lindesay, 2004

Foreword

By Dame Barbara Woodward DCMG OBE

The days and nights I have spent with William, Qi and his family at their farmhouse in the shadow of the Great Wall at Jiankou are among the most vivid and memorable of my life, and of my years in China. Whether we were around the fire in the winter, nestling mugs of hot tea and jostling for space on the sofa with Hadrian (the black Labrador, Williams 60th birthday gift) or sitting under the stars of a summer evening sky with the breeze gently rustling the leaves of the ginkgo trees in the courtyard and the jagged outline of the Wall just visible in the hills beyond, Williams stories of his adventures on the Wall have held me and his many guests entranced.

In this book, William tells the second part of his extraordinary story. Following his solo run along the Great Wall and marriage to Qi, they return to China with their first born, Jimmy, and begin in earnest to preserve and protect the Great Wallthe Wild Wallof China, to research and share its story. It is a story of highsmeeting the Queen and the award of an OBE and recognition in China for his conservation work as the founder of International Friends of the Great Wall, but also of challenges overcome, of peasants throwing bricks with deadly aim at visiting philanthropists, and of a very real brush with death in the Gobi Desert.

Woven through all this is a telling of Chinas social history as the family, joined by Tommy born in 2000 and Hadrian the dog in 2016, experience life in fast-growing China through the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and during the worst of the airpocalypse.

We meet too the terrible and terrific guests who have visited the farmhouse over two decades: from the worse-is-better Spartans to Joanna Lumley as beautiful inside as she is outside. Spoiler alert: the Dutch stand out as the best guests.

William writes with a photographers eye for detail and light, an historians precision with facts and a novelists talent for dialogue. He weaves a narrative which shows why the Great Wall became my life and why it should be a place in your lifetime, at least once.

More than that, as William reflects on saving the life of Qi Juan, a 19-year-old hiker who sustained a serious head injury having fallen off the Wall down a ravine, he resolves to live life to the full with the whole family. For William, of course, the Wall is family. He writes: As soon as you have children you start worrying about many aspects of their future, and so I did with Jiankou. The Wall, for William, has been a physical, political and romantic endeavour.

There is, too, an important underlying message in this book: in an Age of Distraction (as he calls it), only when we stay focussed, dedicated and persistent can we achieve great things. William is indeed Isaiah Berlins hedgehog. He remains as unashamedly super excited about the Wall in the 2020s as he was in the 1980s. His focus and single-mindedness, honed through his early family life in Wallasey and the discipline and dedication required for sporting excellence remain with him and are as evident in this eighth book as they were in the first.

William has found his destiny in Chinas Great Wall and its silent stones could not have a more eloquent spokesperson. The man and the Wall are inseparable: this theatre, my habitat, this enclave of antiquity, my home, this little piece of heaven and history.

I am delighted that, in this inspiring book, William has shared his life of adventure and the adventure of his life; his story of the Wall and of his familys life in China and his true passion for life itself, with all its triumphs and setbacks.

Further away now from the Great Wall than I have been at any point in my life, I shall return to these pages to rekindle my memories of my times on the Wall with William, Qi, Jimmy and Tommy. I shall remember William standing alone, high up on the Great Wall, with the whole day before me to walk along my very own section of the worlds most spectacular open-air museum. I need no other vantage point to appreciate the Walls true greatness. I wish Williams many friends and readers around the world the same pleasure.

Dame Barbara Woodward DCMG OBE

British Ambassador to China, 2015-2020

New York, March 2022

Authors Introduction

The Great Wall on My Doorstep

The Jiankou Years is the second part of my memoir, Wild Wall . The first book, The Foundation Years tells my Great Wall story from the start, by seeing the battlement symbol of the monument marked in my Oxford School Atlas (circa 1967), via the stepping stones of a traverse of Hadrians Wall in 1984, to my life-changing adventure in China during 1987 when I succeeded in making a 2,470 km length journey on foot along the Great Wall, and winning my wife-to-be, Qi. On a quest to know the modern history of her country, I then spent the early 1990s retracing highlights of the Red Armys Long March and visiting places connected to Chairman Mao Zedongs life and times. The Jiankou Years picks up my story soon after that, in 1994, at another great turning point of my life when Qi and I, with our new baby boy Jimmy, returned to China for me to work at China Daily . I specifically chose Beijing as our place to live so that I could get back to the Great Wall at weekends. I wanted to discover the monument in detail. The Beijing Municipality, which is about the size of Wales, contains almost 400 km of the Great Wall, and getting to know it intimately kept me happily occupiedbut unhappily away from Qi and Jimmy, weekend after weekend.