Keith Jones, Adventures with Wild Animals
Close animal encounters
Rub noses with a gray whale,  Pet a Giant Panda Bear,  Snorkel with a shark!

 
Great Wall of China

  The Great Wall is only one of the many places we will visit during our China Panda Encounter Tour.  For more information please email us. Click here to email.

 

    The construction of the Great Wall, the world's largest construction project, took millions of men working lifetimes on nothing but this project.  For example when the Great Wall project was guided by General Meng Tian over a single 10 year  period during the Qin Dynasty, 300,000 troops were used.
     Another example; in the last half of the sixth century nearly 2 million people were used to construct a 250 mile stretch of the wall near Beijing.   The numbers of humans conscripted and who died during the construction are beyond imagining.
      And one more example of the enormous expenditure of life; Emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220) mobilized 600,000 laborers to build a wall from Dunhuang to Yanze, now known as Lop Nur.

The Great Wall over 12,000 Li in length.  7,000+ Kilometers or 4,000+ miles.  Built over a period of time spanning roughly 2,000 years.  Construction is believed to have started before  770 B.C. and continued into the 17th century. 
The series of forts and watchtowers were used to send messages along the wall by smoke signal.  A message could travel hundreds of miles in a matter of hours.
     The Great Wall averages 30 feet in height and 15 feet in width.   The winding snake-like construction follows the terrain as it moves east to west across the face of China.
     The forts along the wall were used as housing, as storage facilities and as towers to give a better view.  They varied considerably in size all the way up to Castle size.
 
Our China tours visit the most scenic and least crowded section of the Great Wall in the Beijing area.  Known as Mutianyu, it is easily the most photogenic.		 The Great Wall began as a series of separate walls intended to defend different areas of China.    Emperor Qin Shihuang succeeded in joining together the various individual pieces of  the wall to hold back invasions by the Huns from the  north of China after the unification of China. 

  Today it is said in China that one must walk the Great Wall to be known as a hero.  Each year several hundred thousand people visit the Great Wall, the majority are Chinese citizens.   More than 20 million visitors have seen the section of the Great Wall at Badaling.

For some reason we tend to think of the Great Wall as being a long and straight fabrication.  Nothing could be further from reality.  Serpentine and Dragon-like is the reality.  Built on high ridges and mountain tops to make access more difficult for invaders.
You may notice that in many of these photos there are no people or only a few people present.  We try to arrive at the Wall early and since we are traveling to a less known location we can usually manage to get some photos that are without other people in them.
Gray whales, Tigers, Elephants, Giant Panda Bears, Blue whales, Whale sharks, Narwhals
China, Canada, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Philippine Islands, Mexico, Arctic Circle
copyright 2007, Keith Jones
No images may be used without written permission of copyright holder
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Unique vacations normally involving animals, culture and adventure
keith@greywhale.com or rowman1998@yahoo.com
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