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Chinese universities may not have produced Great Wall specialists, but a small community of wall enthusiasts has developed outside academia. They tend to be athletic--a rare quality among the Chinese intelligentsia. And the Great Wall attracts obsessives. Dong Yaohui, a former utility-line worker, left his job in 1984 and doggedly followed wall sections on foot for thousands of miles across China. After writing a book about the experience, he helped found the Great Wall Society of China, which publishes two journals and advocates preservation of the fortifications. Cheng Dalin, the retired Xinhua photographer, graduated from a sports academy. William Lindesay, a British geologist and marathoner, came to China in 1986 and spent nine months running and hiking along the wall. He settled in Beijing, published four wall-related books, and founded International Friends of the Great Wall, a small organization that also focusses on conservation.
The most active Great Wall researcher at Peking University is a policeman named Hong Feng. As a child, he enrolled in a sports school--he became a sprinter and a long jumper--but he always enjoyed reading history. After barely missing the cutoff for admission to college, he entered the police academy, and was eventually assigned to the city\'s unit at Peking University. In the mid-nineteen-nineties, he began hiking recreationally and was disappointed with contemporary books about the wall. "They make too many mistakes," he told me. "So I started reading the original texts."
I met Hong Feng in the Peking University police station, where he was working a twenty-four-hour shift. He is the station\'s supervisor, and uses his days off for hiking trips. At forty-five, Hong is tall and extremely fit, although he suffers from a chronically sore right elbow, which was injured when he fell while researching. He often visits the university library, but he has never discussed his research with professors. "Scholars in the archeology and history departments just aren\'t interested in the Great Wall," he told me.
During his hikes, Hong Feng noticed a puzzling fifteen-mile gap in fortifications to the northwest of Beijing. Modern writers had claimed that the landscape was so rugged that it didn\'t require defenses, which made no sense to Hong. He had visited other areas that were much steeper yet heavily fortified, so he turned to the Ming Veritable Records. He discovered that the Ming believed the region contained an important longmai, or dragon vein, just north of their ancestral tombs. A dragon vein is a ridgeline critical to feng-shui, so the Ming went to the trouble of building elaborate walls farther north, on terrain that was naturally less defensible.
Hong Feng published an article about his findings on www.thegreatwall.com.cn, which has become home to the most vibrant community of Chinese wall enthusiasts. The site was launched by Zhang Jun, a software engineer, on May 8, 1999--the day that the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was bombed by NATO. (NATO said that the attack was a mistake.) Members of the Web site have regular dinners in Beijing, and at one of the events I asked Zhang Jun why he had been inspired to found the Web site on that particular date. "You can say that the Great Wall was built to protect China," he said, choosing his words carefully.
The Web site has five thousand members, many of whom are interested in the wall for a combination of patriotic and recreational reasons, although there\'s also a small community of serious researchers. David Spindler joined in 2000. Like everybody else, he adopted an online name--Spindler\'s is Ah Lun, a derivative of the Chinese name that he was given by a language teacher--and he frequently corresponds with others in Chinese. But he doesn\'t attend functions, and he has never identified himself as a foreigner. Starting last fall, he posted two long Chinese articles on the Web site, describing the construction history of specific sections of wall. He told me that he would eventually write his book in English, but for initial articles it made sense to write in Chinese, because the Web site is the only community that cares about such discrete topics.
Spindler had asked me not to identify him to the other members of the Great Wall Web site, and I didn\'t, but they quickly brought up Ah Lun on their own. Hong Feng, the policeman, spoke admiringly of Ah Lun\'s research, assuming that he was Chinese. "He doesn\'t write very much, but what he writes is deep," Hong said. "He must be some kind of graduate student or scholar. I don\'t ask, and he doesn\'t tell."
Eventually, Spindler planned to "come out" as a foreigner, but he had always been wary of the site\'s nationalism. And he remembered the way he felt after defending his thesis at Peking University. "My professor said, \'In the rules for foreigners, we usually give them a little more latitude,\' " Spindler told me. "If I had had more presence of mind, I would have said, \'Well, I\'ve been here for the experience, and I\'ll be happy to walk away without a degree.\' " He continued, "I want my work to be evaluated on these stand-alone terms. Who it\'s written by, whether he\'s Chinese or foreign, shouldn\'t matter."
Because Spindler was worried that he wouldn\'t get the credit he deserved for his work, he published under a pseudonym--it seemed contradictory, like many of his actions. He was extremely cautious, but somehow he had risked everything--financial stability, relationships, personal safety--for his research. He had confidence in his ideas about the wall, and described them with perfect clarity, but he refused to start writing his book before the spreadsheets satisfied him. At times, it seemed quixotic--the single-minded pursuit of a strangely ambitious structure--but beneath it lay a deep commitment to rationality. He believed that the wall had been built for a military reason, and that he was researching it in the best way possible. He hated any symbolic use of the Great Wall, especially for something as complex as Chinese culture. For Chinese, the wall usually represents national glory, whereas foreigners often see it as evidence of xenophobia. Spindler believed that neither interpretation was useful. "It\'s just one manifestation of what China has done," he said. "It\'s just a way they defended themselves."
Of all the people I met, Hong Feng had a viewpoint that reminded me the most of Spindler\'s. Hong\'s online name is Shi Shu, which means "to reach the end of the books." "People in China always describe the Great Wall as a symbol of ethnic pride," Hong told me. "But that\'s an exaggeration. It wasn\'t supposed to be a great monument like the Pyramids. It was built in response to attacks."
At the end of December, I accompanied Spindler on his three-hundred-and-fortieth trip along the wall. During a previous visit to Miyun, north of the city, he\'d seen some high ridges that he believed might contain towers of piled stone. Slowly, we climbed to the ridges: nothing. But it was another day to be checked off on the to-do list.
Although I had never liked the bushwhacking, during the past year I had come to appreciate the distinctive rhythm of the trips. Every journey had it all: good trails, bad trails, hellish thorns, spectacular views. No matter the landscape, I could always see Spindler up ahead, his white hat bobbing above the thickets.
On the way down, we found a dead roe deer in a trap. The loop snare had caught the animal around the neck; it must have strangled itself. Just beyond that, we reached a long section of wall where most ramparts had crumbled away. As I walked atop the structure, my boot got caught in a hole. I tripped and fell down a short ledge, pitching head first toward a ten-foot drop. Somehow--things happened very fast--I threw myself down against the wall. I slammed to a stop with my head peering over the edge.
"Nice save," Spindler said, after he had rushed over. I rose slowly, and tried to walk, and knew that my left knee was badly hurt. But we were miles from help, and the temperature was well below freezing; the only option was to keep moving.
During the descent, I leaned on Spindler whenever possible. It took three hours, and I remember every minute. The next morning, I went to the hospital for X-rays. The doctor told me that I\'d broken my kneecap and I\'d be on crutches for six weeks; and that was the last time I walked on the Great Wall of China.
The day after the accident, Spindler stopped by my apartment. He asked if there was anything I needed, and I could tell that he felt bad about what had happened. He mentioned that he had made a quick analysis of the spreadsheets, which showed that mine was only the second casualty to be sustained in approximately twelve hundred and fifty person-days of hiking. Later, he confirmed that the exact figure was twelve hundred and forty-five.
In February, before leaving on a research trip to Taiwan, he visited me again. He planned to study some Ming maps and memorials that were held in Taipei\'s National Palace Museum. He still hadn\'t written anything in English, but additional Chinese articles were in the works, and he seemed to be thinking more about the future. He planned to start writing the book within a year or so; after it was finished, he\'d find a way to continue researching the wall. Maybe he\'d start a Ph.D. program, or perhaps he\'d remain independent, supporting himself with lectures and books. "I\'ll need to learn other languages in order to get academics to give me the time of day," he said. "You really get written off if you don\'t know Japanese, if you don\'t know Mongolian. There are others that would be helpful. Probably the next one would be Russian, and possibly German. I guess it would be helpful to learn some Manchurian. A little Tibetan. But those are further down the list."
I hopped on crutches to the door and said goodbye. He had an early flight; in order to save money, he\'d booked a ticket with a seven-hour layover in the Macao airport. When I\'d asked how many Beijing hiking days were left, he didn\'t hesitate. "Eighty-six," he said.
COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
本帖由 carmen 于2008-04-10 23:45:45发表
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