a dog owner himself, but in China that doesn’t necessarily involve dietary restrictions. He charged me twelve bucks for the light cover—the same price as a midsize dent.
They never asked where I was taking the Jeep Cherokee. The rental contract specifically forbade drivers from leaving the Beijing region, but I decided to ignore this rule—they wouldn’t figure it out until I returned the Jeep with a loaded odometer. In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission. The Jeep was the biggest vehicle on the lot, a Cherokee 7250, and they gave me a special price of thirty dollars a day. It was white, with purple detailing along the sides; the doors were decorated with the English words “City Special.” The name was accurate—the thing would be worthless in rough terrain, because it was strictly rear-wheel drive. I was certain that at some point on my journey I’d get stuck in mud or sand or snow, but there was no point in worrying about that now, because Capital Motors had nothing better to offer. At any rate, if things got bad in the west I could always call Mr. Zhang, the feng shui master. On his business card he offered to “tow cars and trucks”—service number twenty-two, listed between “collecting bones” and “playing horns and drums.”
DRIVING WEST, I HAD climbed steadily, until now in northern Shanxi the elevation was over four thousand feet. This was a dry, dusty landscape, with low brown peaks scarred by creekbeds that had burrowed into their flanks. It was as if the mountains had been bled of all brightness, the color running down the hillsides and pooling in fields where farmers harvested sweet oats. Only these valleys were vivid: the deep green of the crops, the dark shimmer of irrigation channels, the bright blue of the cotton jackets that were still common among elderly Chinese in the countryside. But the landscape had a stark, simple beauty, and for the first time it felt open—a foreshadowing of the great steppes of Central Asia.
Everywhere the valley floor was broken by the remnants of signal towers. They were made of tamped earth, the same dusty brown color as the hills, and they rose more than twenty feet tall. Some villages were entirely surrounded by ancient defenseworks. To the north, Inner Mongolia lay less than twenty miles away, and on my map this provincial boundary was marked by a familiar symbol:
I pulled over at the last village before the border. The place was called Ninglu Bu—many town names in this region include the character bu, which means “fortress,” because they’re located on the sites of former Ming-dynasty garrisons. In Ninglu an old fort stood in the middle of town, and the village was surrounded by walls of packed earth. These fortifications completely dwarfed the simple homes of today’s residents, who numbered only one hundred and twenty.
When I stopped in villages with ancient ruins, I often asked locals if anybody knew the history. In Ninglu, a group of elderly people in the village square responded immediately. “Talk to Old Chen,” somebody said, and another man shuffled off to find him. Five minutes later, Chen Zhen appeared. He was fifty-three years old, with sun-lined skin and gray hair that had been cropped close. He wore dark policeman’s pants, a green shirt that bore the gold buttons of the People’s Liberation Army, and a blue military jacket with epaulets on the shoulders and stripes across the cuffs. In the Chinese countryside, men often wear surplus army and police gear, because the cheap garments are practical. Invariably these clothes are mismatched and oversized; Old Chen’s sleeves hung to his fingertips. He looked as if he had inherited the outfit, much as Ninglu had inherited its earthen walls—all of it, from the baggy jackets to the crumbling fortifications, could have been the castoffs of some defeated army that had abandoned everything and fled south.
He stood ramrod straight while I introduced myself. I explained that I had come from Beijing and was interested in the Great Wall; I asked if he knew anything about the history of this village. Old Chen listened carefully and then he cleared his throat. “Come with me,” he said. “I have information.”
I followed him down a dirt path that led to a series of mud-walled houses. At the largest one, he opened the door. Most of the room was occupied by the kang, the brick bed that’s traditionally used in northern China. During winter a kang can be heated from beneath with a wood fire, but in Ninglu it was still autumn, and Old Chen was saving his fuel. The room was cold; he poured me a cup of tea to warm my hands. He opened a drawer in a cabinet, removed a sheaf of thin rice paper, and proudly handed it over. The front cover featured a handwritten title:
The Annals of Ninglu Bu
Research Established January 22, 1992
On page one, Old Chen’s careful script read: “The town wall was built in the 22nd year of the Jiajing emperor (in 1543), and encased in kiln-fired brick in the first year of the Wanli emperor (in 1573).” I flipped through the book—dozens of pages, hundreds of dates. There were maps: one page had been labeled “Great Wall,” and it was crisscrossed with thick blue lines and circles.
“There are thirty-three signal towers in this region,” Old Chen explained, pointing at the circles on the map. “Those are from the Ming. The Ming wall is along the Inner Mongolian border. But there are other walls also going through this region, from other dynasties.”
He opened a second drawer and took out a gray shard of pottery. When he handed it over, the hardened clay felt cool in my palm. “What dynasty do you think this is from?” he asked.
I told him that I had no idea, and Old Chen looked disappointed.
“Well, if you ever come back here, maybe you can bring an archaeologist,” he said. “I know where a lot of this pottery can be found, but I don’t know which dynasty it is.” He told me that treasure seekers had found intact pottery and bronze artifacts in this area. “All of the good ones have been sold,” he said. “Nobody regulates it.”
The research was his hobby—he was a farmer, and in the past he had also served as Party Secretary, the highest Communist Party position in the village. Now he was retired from local politics but he still worked two acres of land, where he grew potatoes. He owned five sheep. He told me that his annual income was around two hundred dollars, and he had only a sixth-grade education, but he had done his best to educate himself in history. Since retiring, he had made frequent trips to the government archives of Zuoyun County, fifteen miles away. He tracked down information about local fortifications, and he surveyed the region, trying to match ruins with historical descriptions. He had also interviewed Ninglu’s elderly residents, some of whom remembered the war against the Japanese, when bricks from the Ming garrison wall had been harvested to build houses. I asked why he had undertaken the research. “Because nobody else was doing it,” he said. “If nobody studies it, then nobody’s going to know the past.”
In terms of academia, Old Chen was right: there isn’t a single scholar at any university in the world who specializes in the Great Wall. Chinese historians focus on textual research, and usually they study political institutions that can be traced through the records of a dynasty or a government. In the field, archaeologists tend to excavate ancient tombs. The Great Wall fits into neither tradition: it’s not underground, and it’s not strictly on the printed page; a researcher needs to combine both fieldwork and reading. Even if a scholar were interested, he’d have trouble defining his subject, because there are hundreds of walls across the north. In the past, this was the most problematic region for Chinese empires, which enjoyed natural boundaries in other directions: ocean to the east, jungle to the south, the Himalayas to the west. But the northern steppes are wide open, and in ancient times this landscape was populated by nomadic tribes who raided their more sedentary neighbors. In response, the Chinese often built walls—the earliest known historical reference to such defenseworks dates to 656 BC. Over the next two millennia, many dynasties constructed fortifications, but they did so in different ways and used different terms to describe their defenseworks.
