The Great Wall and The Ming Tombs

Nov 8

LiNa, Ling and Xing pick us up at the hotel at 8:30 am.  We are headed to the Great Wall of China!!  A drive that should take 1.5 hours takes 3 hours.  But we are fortunate to be here.  On Sat (Nov 3) it snowed so heavily that access to the wall was closed and only re opened on Tuesday Nov 6.

We stop at the Badaling area of the wall and Xing finds somewhere to park, we think it is very busy here.  LiNa assures us that this is not busy, we are lucky to be here when it is so quiet!

We walk past a Chinese snow - non man. 

Construction of The Great Wall began in 221BC.  Every emperor continued the building of the wall in an effort to ward off barbarians. The Wall has a watch tower every 50 to 100 meters, which was manned and included living quarters.  Pretty sure room service was not included - wonder how the results of the  'Employee Satisfaction Survey' was spun at that time!

The Wall was heavily restored in the 1950's and 1980's.  There are two routes a tourist can  take to explore the wall.  Because we are well trained athletes  (insert font for sarcasm) we chose the route preferred by athletic mountain goats.

At one of the watch towers a fine bloke from England took this brilliant photo.

  We are fortunate to have a clear day and it is really not that cold.  We have been given guardianship of Charlottes 'Flat Stanley and Flat Stella' 

so we include them in our photo op.

I am wearing a t-shirt from the City of Lacombe so pose for a photo to send to the City's blog site (I still have trouble thinking of Lacombe as a City) 

  LiAn chuckles when we say we live in a city!

LiAn says the Wall was built at a great cost to human life,  bodies were incorporated into the Wall, so it is also the worlds longest cemetery.  

Once we have completed our trek of the Wall we have a quick lunch at KFC - LiNa, Ling and Xing all love KFC!

From the Wall we travel to the Ming Tombs , which is the final resting place of 13 of the 16 Ming Emperors.  

We walk through  a museum which includes the valuable artifacts that were discovered in the excavation of one of the emperors tombs.

  She also mentions that when an emperor died several of his eunuchs (another very sad story) and concubines actually committed suicide in an effort to keep the emperor company in his after life. I am very thankful for the progress of humanity.

Sad story about eunuchs...they were boys born to families who could not feed or house them, if the family sent them to be a eunuch then they were assured of food and shelter.  Of course eunuchs suited the emperor very well...so sad.  Concubines are another sad story - you can imagine the details....

On the way home we stopped at a jade factory...so much beauty!