Northern China; this page: the sections near Beijing
长城 · Chángchéng
Not one wall but many, built over two thousand years across northern China. Near Beijing, two restored Ming sections are the easiest to walk: Badaling and Mutianyu.
Photo: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
The Great Wall is not one wall. It is many walls, built by different states and dynasties between the 600s BC and the 1600s AD. A national survey finished in 2012 measured all of them together at 21,196 kilometres. The wall of brick and stone that most visitors see is the youngest. The Ming built it, and it runs for 8,851 kilometres.
Nobody visits "the Great Wall". You visit a section of it. North of Beijing two restored sections are open and easy to reach. Badaling is the pass that guarded the road to the capital. Mutianyu is quieter and has towers found nowhere else. Each has its own page.
Each of these has its own page, with its own story, pictures and visiting notes.
BadalingThe pass on the road to Beijing: a fortress with two gates and the climb to North Tower 8.
MutianyuThree towers side by side on one platform, a design found nowhere else on the wall.
Every section has its own gate and its own ticket. There is no ticket for the wall as a whole.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| Badaling | Own ticket; see its page |
| Mutianyu | Own ticket; see its page |
| Juyongguan, the inner pass south of Badaling | Own ticket; no page here yet |
| Simatai and Jinshanling, further north-east | Own tickets; no pages here yet |
| Jiankou and other unrestored stretches | Closed to visitors |
Farming states in the south built walls against horsemen from the steppe in the north. After 221 BC the First Emperor of Qin joined the older walls into one line. That wall was rammed earth, and little of it is left. The Han pushed the line west into the desert.
The Ming rebuilt the wall in brick and stone after 1449, when a Mongol army captured their emperor in battle. Most of what stands near Beijing dates from the 1500s.
A wall is only part of the system. Towers passed signals by smoke in the day and fire at night. Gates were set in the passes, and soldiers lived along the line.
Which section? Badaling is the nearest, has a railway station, and is the most crowded. Mutianyu is about 70 kilometres north-east of the city, has fewer people, and has a cable car up and a toboggan down. The unrestored "wild wall", such as Jiankou, is closed and dangerous.
The pass you are walking through has been crossed by armies, rebels and heads of state. Some of them stood on these same stones.
How long: the national survey published in 2012 counted 21,196.18 km for all periods, of which the Ming wall is 8,851.8 km. It is not one continuous wall but the sum of walls, trenches and forts from many dynasties.
The First Emperor joined up the walls of the Warring States (475–221 BC). But the brick and stone wall you see near Beijing is almost all Ming, and has little to do with him.
Another long wall: Hadrian's Wall in Britain, begun in AD 122, about 117 km. It too was a farming empire's line against the north, and it too is World Heritage.
“He who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man” comes from a poem Mao Zedong wrote in 1935 on the Long March, at Liupan Mountain in Ningxia. The wall in the poem is a general image, not Badaling. Badaling carved the line on a stone anyway.
Kafka, who never went to China, wrote “The Great Wall of China” in 1917, turning the wall's piece-by-piece construction into a parable about empire and the individual.
In 1988 the artists Marina Abramović and Ulay walked toward each other from the two ends of the wall, she from the sea, he from the Gobi. After 90 days they met in Shaanxi. They had planned to marry there. They parted instead.
Visitors: Nehru was the first foreign leader on the wall at Badaling, in 1954. Nixon came on 24 February 1972, Queen Elizabeth II on 14 October 1986, Obama in 2009. Clinton, in 1998, went to Mutianyu.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1404 | Mutianyu Pass built | In 1405 Zheng He sails on his first voyage. Florence is still wondering how to roof its cathedral; work on the dome starts 16 years later. |
| 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. |
| 1568–1569 | Qi Jiguang posted north; major rebuilding around Mutianyu | In 1569 Mercator publishes the world map projection still used today. |
| 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. |
One line to remember: the year the “lock and key” tablet went up over the west gate, Europe had just moved its calendar forward ten days.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Under the Qin (221–206 BC) the husband of Meng Jiangnü was taken to build the wall and died there. She walked a thousand li to find him and wept until a stretch of the wall fell down.
Source: One of China's four great folk tales
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.
Stand at the site, sign in, press the button, and collect its stamp. Your browser will ask to use your location. It is sent to us once to confirm that you are at the site; we keep how far you were from it, not the spot where you stood.
Your stamps are saved to your account, so they follow you to any device. Checking from a browser cannot rule out every false location; stricter checks arrive with the app.
Photos here show the place, not people. Each one is credited to the visitor who took it and appears after our team has looked at it. A photo with you in it belongs under “I am here”.