Yanqing, Beijing, China
八达岭长城 · Bādálǐng Chángchéng
The pass that guarded the road from the steppe to Beijing, and the first stretch of the wall opened to visitors, in 1958. It is the busiest section of all.
Photo: Taty2007, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
Badaling is not the pass itself. It is the outpost in front of the pass. Juyong Pass lies 20 km down the valley, and people in the past said its strength lay not in its own walls but here. The fortress under your feet was built in 1505, one year after Michelangelo finished his David.
Part of The Great Wall of China. Also there: Mutianyu.
Badaling is a fortress across a pass, with the wall climbing the ridges on both sides of it. One ticket covers the fortress and the wall. The cable car and the pulley car are extra.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The fortress and its two gates | Included |
| The north side: North Tower 1 to North Tower 8, and on to North 12 | Included; the steeper and busier side |
| The south side: South Tower 1 to South Tower 7 | Included; fewer people |
| Cable car and pulley car | Extra tickets |
| The Great Wall Museum of China | At the foot of the wall; check on the day whether it is open |
This is the highest tower at Badaling, more than 1,500 m from the fortress. When people say “he who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man”, this is the tower they mean you to reach.
Look south: the road in the valley is the Guangou, the main corridor from the northern grasslands into the Beijing plain. Badaling plugs its northern mouth.
Look north: beyond the hills is the Yanqing basin, and farther north-west Zhangjiakou and Datong. Mongol cavalry came from that direction in Ming (1368–1644) times.
In 1213 Genghis Khan's army went around the front and took the Juyong defences from behind. In 1644 Li Zicheng's rebels came this way into Beijing. A wall cannot hold up a dynasty that is already falling.
The fortress is a trapezoid, narrow in the east and wide in the west. It was built in 1505 and repaired under the Jiajing and Wanli emperors.
Over the east gate are four characters cut in 1539: Juyong Wai Zhen, “the outer garrison of Juyong”. One tablet states what Badaling was: the forward post at the northern mouth of the Juyong defences.
Beside the road outside the east gate is a granite boulder carved “Capital-Gazing Stone”.
The tablet is 2.26 m long and 0.91 m high. It was set up in 1582 by Wu Dui, governor-general of Ji and Liao.
The phrase means “lock and key of the northern gate”. It goes back to the Song (960–1279) statesman Kou Zhun, who called himself the lock and key of the realm's northern door. Wu Dui borrowed it for Badaling: lock this, and the capital's north gate is locked.
Battlements and loopholes: the high wall on the outer, northern side has gaps for shooting, and below each gap a small hole for firing downward. The low wall on the inner side is there to stop soldiers falling off.
Drains: every so often a stone spout sticks out from the top of the wall and throws rainwater clear. Standing water is the wall's worst enemy; this is one reason it has stood five hundred years.
Towers: 12 stand north of the fortress and 7 to the south. The hollow kind, where soldiers could live and store weapons, was built in great numbers from the 1560s, a design closely tied to the general Qi Jiguang.
Bricks: around Beijing some bricks carry a stamped year and the name of the unit that fired them. It was a system of accountability. You can see examples in the Great Wall Museum at Badaling.
In 2018 Badaling received more than 9.9 million visitors, up to 80,000 on a single holiday. Since 1 June 2019 tickets have been sold by name with a cap of 65,000 a day, the first such limit on any Great Wall site.
In Shixia village, below the western extension, a villager named Mei Jingtian has spent decades carrying fallen bricks back to the wall, one at a time.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1505 | Badaling fortress built | Michelangelo finished David in 1504. The foundation stone of St Peter's in Rome is laid in 1506. |
| 1539 | East gate tablet carved | Spanish conquistadors have just brought down the Inca empire. |
| 1582 | West gate tablet set up | The Pope introduces the Gregorian calendar. Matteo Ricci arrives in Macau. |
| 1644 | Li Zicheng enters Beijing; the Ming falls | The English Civil War is under way. |
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
In 1900, fleeing west from the Eight-Nation Alliance, the Empress Dowager Cixi is said to have stood on this stone outside the east gate of Badaling to look back at Beijing. No archive shows that she stopped here.
Source: Local folk tale
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-11. Travel and news reports, not the site's own notices.
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