Walking Chinas Great Wall

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our China travel special

The Great Wall near Beijing is such a monumental curtain of stone that many
think it runs like that all across north China.

In fact, the Great Wall is not a single wall, and not all its many bits are
great, because much of it is made of rammed earth that is easily eroded, dug
or bulldozed out of existence. Once, of course, dynasties defined themselves
by building their own versions of the Wall.

One section, built by the Han (206BC-AD220), ran from the far western deserts
in Xinjiang, through the narrow Gansu Corridor, the ancient route along the
Qilian mountains to central Asia, and then swung south to make a sudden left
turn at its most southerly point: Lanzhou.