About half of the camp got up really early this Sunday morning to go for a walk along part of the city wall. We got up early because the walk was about 8 miles long, and we had to back for lunch. The wall is really old (Ming Dynasty, mid 1300’s), beautiful, and has withstood a ton of stuff. It’s made of stone bricks mortared together, in a similar fashion to the Great Wall (or so I’ve heard) because both walls were built around the same time by the same dynasty.
It was really different and interesting to see a wall that’s this old, and has withstood so much history. It’s stood through at least one destruction of the city, and 600+ other years of wear and tear. That destruction was in the 1930’s when the Japanese brutally took over the city as part of their invasion of China. The walls have lots of bullet holes in them from this invasion, as well as that some parts of the wall were destroyed.
We started our walk at one of the city gates. We climbed up to the top of the gate, looked around for a bit, and then climbed back down to start walking along the outside of the wall on the ground. There was a nice view from the top of the gate, both outside the city, and inside the city. When we climbed down from the gate we all went down this really steep staircase that was right on the inside of the wall. It was so steep that everybody was taking it one step at a time, and most people were also putting a hand against the side of the wall just as an extra precaution, because there were only a few feet between the bottom of the stairs and the highway. I braved it, and went down the middle of the staircase without using the wall on either side.
The path on the outside of the wall was sometimes like a road, sometimes it was only for pedestrians, and usually it seemed to be something in between. At one point near the beginning of the walk we were walking on a path that was like a boardwalk way up in the air. It made it so that we were walking right about the same level as the middle of the trees…lots of deciduous trees, and lots of large bamboo.
About half of the walk was inside a recreation area/park, in which we were walking along the side of a big, shallow lake. I just looked it up on the web, and it turns out that that was Xuanwu Lake Park. Out over the lake you could see other parts of the city in the distance.
At one point next to the road there was a little exercise park. At first it looked like a children’s playground, but then as we got closer to it I realized that it was adults on pieces of equipment, and it was actually for exercising, not for playing around. It looked like a low-tech gym, which I thought was a nice way to provide yet another way to get some exercise. Like what those old exercise stations in US parks from the 1980’s, except this was a pretty new installation, and all in one place, not in stations. Along the road in the park there were more of the funny stone paths, holey stone sculptures, and some really interesting plants.
Once we got towards the end of the lake we left the park, and started walking on sidewalks/streets inside the city. I enjoyed getting to see the city from the perspective of just walking along a normal street. One of the things that caught my attention on that part of the trip was when we passed what was (is?) a factory of some sort. At first I just noticed that there were walls made of smooth concrete about 10ft tall along the side of the road. Then a few minutes later I realized that these walls had shards of broken glass sticking out of the top of them, and also a small barbed wire fence that was sticking out of the top of the concrete. That’s not a security system I had really seen in person before. I’m not sure if the factory is still active anymore, because it looked pretty run down and deserted, but it was on a weekend, so I don’t really know if that’s true most days of the week.
After walking awhile through the streets we came to this McDonald’s that the administrators had decided would make a good place to stop and have some food. It was sort of weird eating at a McDonald’s in China, but apparently their milkshakes are nice and cold no matter where you are in the world. The McDonald’s was pretty near to the end of our walk, so we walked a bit farther, maybe 30 minutes, through some more residential streets before our walk ended. These streets were a lot more active than some of the previous streets had been.
Our walk finally ended at about noon when we met up with all the people in camp who had decided not to go on the walk. We met up at some other site along the city wall, but I’m not sure quite what it was, as we pretty much just got into RA groups and loaded into the buses to go back to HNC. I think it might have been another gate from the little bit of it I did see.
All in all, the walk was a great experience. I enjoyed seeing all the many, many things we saw, seeing the city from the perspective of regular pedestrian, and just getting to talk with my friends for the six hours it took us to walk the 8 miles of the wall walk. But I won’t deny that it was nice to finally get back to the buses at the end of those 8 miles and 6 hours.
When we got back to HNC the staff had found a pizza place somewhere in Nanjing, and had ordered pizza for everyone for lunch. It was actually pretty good pizza, although I didn’t mind at all having our regular Chinese food for meals.
After lunch everyone loaded back up in to the buses again, and we went back to the wall. Actually, first we went to a large Buddhist temple that was right next the part of the wall we had walked along earlier. The map names it as Jiming Temple. It has a direct entrance right onto the wall, so after seeing the temple we got a chance to walk a little ways on top of the wall.
The temple was really large, and we were told that it has a monastery attached to it as well. The temple is made up of a bunch of mostly small buildings all clumped and connected together with various passages and courtyards. The buildings are all painted a beautiful dark yellow, with dark red trim. They also all have the classic temple roofs that turn up at the edges. There are plenty of trees inside the temple grounds, and their green really brings out the yellow and red of the buildings to make the whole place look gorgeous. The temple is placed on the side, or maybe top, of a small hill which makes its many stories seem extra tall.
Right at the bottom of the stairs to the entrance of the temple was a pair of large lion statues. I didn’t notice it at first glance, but each lion was squishing another tiny lion under one of its front paws…why this is, I have no clue. I can understand the lion statues, but why a tiny lion should be squished is something I don’t understand.
As we entered the temple we were each given three sticks of incense. They were each about 18 inches long, very thin, and yellow on the outside. Then up near the top of the temple there was a pair of little stands, like under which a vendor might be. One had a bunch of lit candles inside it for lighting incense sticks, and the other had sand in which you could stick you incense after it was lit.
The stands were on one side of a courtyard that had an altar/shrine room in the middle of it, and other room around the sides. There was also a Drum Tower near this courtyard, but I didn’t get the chance to go up into it. The Drum Tower is the tallest part of the temple. On the other side of the courtyard, near the incense stands, there was a set of stairs going down to other parts of the temple. At the top of these stairs there was a little landing from which there was quite a nice view off over the wall and the city.
After the whole group looked around the temple, which meant mostly just looking around that courtyard and the buildings surrounding it, we all headed over to the wall. There were a few halls/passageways we went through, and then we were walking out onto the top of the wall. I really enjoyed getting to walk on top of the wall for awhile (1/2 mile, maybe a mile, I’m not really sure how far we went). This was especially true after having walked right at the bottom of the wall all that morning.
Walking on top of the wall was almost like walking on a good size stone road that was partially covered in grass. On a few of the bricks you could see Chinese characters carved into them. I think the carvings are sort of like maker’s marks. The edges of the wall extended up about 4 feet above the main surface that we were walking on. There were little chunks “cut” out of the wall, such as ones that archers might have shot through, which meant that you could pretty easily step up right next to the wall and look out over the city. It was an amazing view, if nothing else because you could see so far out over the city. One of the times I looked out over the city I, and a lot of other CTYers around me, realized that there was a really big plume of smoke coming up from the fairly tall buildings on the horizon. I guess one of them had caught on fire, and a pretty big fire from the amount of smoke.
In the opposite direction from the city horizon was the temple. It really gave a good feel for just how large the place is, because when you’re on temple grounds you can never really see the whole view of it at once. This is when I really noticed the lovely combination of the yellow and red of the buildings in contrast with the green of the trees.
There was one aspect that I really hadn’t noticed during the wall walk, and that was that the wall actually split and became two walls really close to the temple. I had noticed the two walls a ways farther on, on the wall walk, and was really confused about why there were suddenly two walls instead of one. Then from on top of the wall I saw what it was. There is a second, smaller wall that branches off from the first on a little ways from the temple. To reach it from the main wall you go down a staircase that just leads straight through the wall. It turns out that there are actually a series of small rooms and passages inside the wall. Although once I thought about it I realized that this made perfect sense if one is trying to defend the wall, and doesn’t want to expose their neck to the enemy all the time.
The whole group walked a little farther down the top of the wall, and then we went down another staircase inside the wall. This one ended out at a set of stairs we had seen on the wall walk that dumped us down on the path/road we had walked along that morning. We walked a short ways back down that road, to slightly closer than the temple where the walls split. There we met our buses, and headed back to HNC for the last time that weekend. We had a bit of free time back at HNC, and then ended the weekend with two hours of study hall.