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Lindesay at his family's Huairou farmhouse, 2001
What brought you to Beijing?
The Great Wall. But not just to see it. I came to see all of it. I wanted to make a journey on foot along its whole length.
It was March 1986. The brownish haze. The airport was tiny. The air smelled of something indescribable. I later worked out it was coal. Of course the cyclists ruled the roads. All of them rode on the same black, rusty, squeaky bicycles. The bell ringing became the sound of Beijing to me. The wide central avenue was devoid of traffic in the middle with just streams of cyclists along the edge. The bike parking lots were ENORMOUS. It was really difficult to find your own bike! People staring without any reservation was quite the norm.
Adventuring in 1987
Did you imagine that you would still be here 35 years later?
Of course not! No way! It was planet China back then and everything felt alien, and with so much crowding and attention and staring I felt that I was an alien as well. I mean, I’m 1m 87cm in height and have enormous size (U.S. 14) feet! Actually when I arrived I felt that my goal — a journey along the Wall from its desert start in the far west, Jiayuguan, to where it meets the sea at Shanhaiguan — would be impossible. But I just told myself to keep my head down, take one day at a time. So I just focused on the seaside terminus of the Wall which was my finish line. I expected that if, by any chance, I ever reached there then it would be "Wall’s end" for me, and I’d go back to the U.K. to re-enter "normal" life, find a beautiful girl, get married and live the Great British way of life. That plan went nicely wrong. I met a beautiful girl in Beijing and we settled here in China in 1990 — to live the Great Wall way of life.
Cleaning the Wall in 1999
How do you think Beijing has changed you as a person?
In the early days it felt uncomfortable being a foreigner in Beijing. I’m still a foreigner here, even though I’ve been here for longer than most of the people that might pass me in the street, and I’ll always be a foreigner in their eyes. But I feel comfortable with that now. It’s just normal to me.
Lindesay, his wife, and two sons
Then in 2000 I decided to take the plunge, and restart my life: I was 43. I wanted to spend all of my time doing the things that I loved most — and that was "anything related to the Wall". I’d invented the term "Wild Wall" in 1994, so chose it as the name for my website, business and what became our signature experience — the "WildWall Weekend" — based at our farmhouse property at Jiankou. This was a huge turning point in our lives. My interest, my hobby, became my bread and butter.
A family photo, recreated
Without telling the Wall story the way I have discovered it I could never have rolled out and subsidized so many different Great Wall projects one after another over the last 20 years or so. I’ve been stealing the family silver to protect the Wall, to "rephotograph it" and show what changes have befallen it, to tell an "off-Wall" account of its history through 50 Objects, to explore sections of it outside China in Mongolia, and to make an internationally-successful documentary. Of course the last 20 years have been all but smooth, but from the get go on my foundation journey along the Wall in the '80s that was never the case — most of China was closed to foreigners back then I had to trespass repeatedly through closed areas to achieve my goal. From then on I’ve always expected the Wall to be a rough partner.
The whole family at Jiayuguan, 2007
All grown up at Badaling, 2018
Made-in-China restaurant at the Grand Hyatt. An old favorite for my whole family, a high days and holy days treat for anniversaries, birthdays, when family visits from afar, happy memories of graduation lunches, and gathering after book publications and during the Olympic Games of 2008.
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Images courtesy of William Lindsey
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