{"id":23,"date":"2009-10-24T18:17:17","date_gmt":"2009-10-24T23:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnstrawn.com\/?p=23"},"modified":"2009-11-03T05:39:15","modified_gmt":"2009-11-03T10:39:15","slug":"great-wall-as-home-depot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/travel-notes\/23\/great-wall-as-home-depot","title":{"rendered":"Great Wall as Home Depot"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"Great

Great Wall North of Beijing<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

\n
\"A<\/dt>\n
A Great Chimney<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n
My friends Robert Devine and Shan Zhou are developing a fantastic eco-resort at the base of a section of the Great Wall north of Beijing.\u00a0 Almost 20 kilometers of Great Wall forms a looping boundary of the valley into which the amenities of the \u00a0resort will be fitted.\u00a0 It runs atop a\u00a0ridge line that’s so steep in places that the stairs to\u00a0ascend it have the pitch of a ladder.\u00a0 The views are astonishing, and it’s impossible to be on it without\u00a0feeling admiration for\u00a0the\u00a0people who were able to build it.\u00a0\u00a0 Of the 15 or so square kilometers the Great Wall Resort will control, only 3% will have any buildings or development associated with the Resort.\u00a0 The rest is a combination of forest, natural landscapes, and traditional farming modified by a commitment to organic and sustainable practices.\u00a0 They are also planting vineyards.\u00a0\u00a0 Beijing’s climate is a\u00a0 mix of Houston and Stockholm’s, so getting the right grapes will be a challenge.\u00a0 But Robert and Shan are passionate about doing the right thing, so I expect the Great Wall Resort will be known before too long as one of the world’s great getaways.\u00a0\u00a0 What they won’t do is continue certain local building practices.\u00a0 As we were walking through a tiny village coming back to our car after several hours on the Great Wall, Shan pointed out the chimney on the house we were passing–made with Great Wall bricks.\u00a0 The locals have been mining the wall for generations, just as people do world-wide when regimes fall and old defenses crumble.\u00a0\u00a0The Coliseum in Rome was a handy quarry for the Church for centuries.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0People living now at the\u00a0base of the Great Wall now\u00a0may have ancient memories of ancestors forced to build the damn thing. \u00a0 There’s no sentimentality about the Wall.\u00a0 The Wall also provides some jobs–after hiking up about 800 meters to the base of the local Wall and then hand-over-hand up a makeshift ladder to reach the top, I was feeling proud of my fitness when I heard a loud “ni hao,” looked up and saw an 80 year man smoking a cigarette and offering to sell me a bottle of water from the cooler he’d shlepped up to his mini-kiosk on top of the ridge.<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0August 2009<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Great Chimney My friends Robert Devine and Shan Zhou are developing a fantastic eco-resort at the base of a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[152,176],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-travel-notes","category-business-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2009\/09\/200908080253.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/106"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}