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William Lindesay

Lindesay edged forward on his path, looking at and comparing the two scenes, before coming to a halt.   The photo in his hand, it seemed, must have been taken somewhere around where he stood. With his thumbs and forefingers, he made a rectangle and mimicked framing the view that once might have been seen through a camera. After some “zooming in and out” and careful comparison with the photo, he was sure he had found the exact place he was looking for. Taking a deep breath, he raised his camera and clicked the shutter. Now, Lindesay had two photos of the same view of the Great Wall, but 80 years apart.

 “This is ‘re-photography,’ ” Lindesay explained. “It links the past and the present with two pictures.”

Lindesay, 50, of Great Britain, was busy preparing his “Great Wall Revisited: How the Great Wall Has Changed” exhibition when this article was being written. Scheduled to open on January 5, 2007, in the Capital Museum of Beijing, the exhibition features 72 pairs of “then” and “now” photos of the Great Wall, with some representing intervals of more than 100 years.

The disappearing Great Wall

 In 1982, Lindesay bought a globe from National Geographic Society in Washington D.C. He was thrilled to find the jagged line that indicated the Great Wall as the only man-made structure marked on it. But 22 years later, when he revisited the Society in 2004 and bought another globe to keep up with political changes that had taken place worldwide, he was saddened to find that the Wall had been deleted. Sadly, this symbolized a certain reality.

Among the collections displayed at the Capital Museum exhibition, one pair of photos, the older taken in 1948, documents the disappearance of the “Sister Towers,” two watchtowers that once stood side by side at Gubeikou, a rare and perhaps unique architectural arrangement along the Great Wall.

On one of his re-photography journeys, Lindesay visited a farmer in his late 70s who has long lived only 200 metres away from where the Sister Towers once stood. Lindesay learned from the farmer that the towers had been bombed by the Japanese in the 1930s. Decades later, when People’s Liberation Army troops were building a railway down in the valley, they took away bricks from the towers to build shelters. After the troops left, the villagers salvaged the bricks to build yard walls for themselves. All that remains is a hint of what once stood there, little more than a mound of bricks and stones.

“The ill-fate of the Sister Towers is just one of the examples showing that the Great Wall cries for protection,” Lindesay said. “Re-photography such as I have done comes in time to preserve it, for people of today and for people of future generations.”

A childhood dream comes true

In China, Lindesay is famed for being the first foreigner to have travelled, alone and on foot, the entire length of the Great Wall, back in the late 1980s. He has settled in Beijing, where he is the founder and president of the International Friends of the Great Wall, a non-governmental organization devoted to protecting this wonder of human civilization.

But, as destiny would have it, as a child he already had a dream of seeing the Great Wall some day. At 11, when viewing a map in a school atlas he was fascinated by a castellated symbol, beneath which there were the words: “Great Wall of China.” Running his finger along the zigzagged course of the Wall, he crossed deserts, mountains and places he couldn’t pronounce, and finally reached the sea. His dream began that night.

“Sir, when I grow up, I’m going to explore the Great Wall from end to end,” he told his headmaster.

Many people have childhood dreams, but most forget them as they mature. Lindesay didn’t. In 1986, he came to China to see the Great Wall. Deng Xiaoping had opened China to the outside world. But Lindesay didn’t see the red carpet rolled out for him.

Along the nearly 2,500-kilometre-long path, he was arrested nine times and deported once.

“Personally, they (the police) had nothing against me. They were just implementing the laws of the country,” said Lindesay. When he revisited the Great Wall in late 1990, he made friends with many of the policemen who once interrogated him during his first Great Wall odyssey.

“You don’t quite know some one until you have fought with them,” Lindesay said, quoting an old Chinese saying, jokingly.

Another big problem was, of course, language. Lindesay was not very well equipped given that his body language was augmented by just three Chinese sentences only: Wo e le (I’m hungry.); wo lei le (I’m tired.); and, shi Changcheng ma? (Is it the Great Wall?)

After several attempts, however, he had pulled it off by the end of 1987. He reached the Old Dragon’s head in Shanhaiguan where the Wall meets the sea, from Jiayuguan, the west end of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) Great Wall. Soon afterward, Lindesay published a book entitled Alone on the Great Wall, a record of his expedition.

The wall of two Williams–From an explorer to conservationist

After his first Great Wall exploration, Lindesay decided to stay in China permanently. He married Wu Qi, who holds a degree in history from Northwest China University, and the couple has two sons, Jimmy and Tommy. The family now lives in a farmhouse in Beijing’s suburbs, at the foot of the Great Wall. Lindesay made a living by working alternately at China Daily and at the Xinhua News Agency.

An old book sparked his transformation from explorer to Great Wall conservationist. On a winter’s day, in England, during the winter of 1989–90, Mrs. Majorie Hessel-Tiltman was listening to her radio. Lindesay was talking about his just finished end-to-end journey along the Great Wall. After listening to the programme, Hessel-Tiltman searched her personal library and found a volume published about 80 years before.

A couple of months later, the book found its way to Lindesay, accompanied by a short letter. “Dear Mr. Lindesay, I heard you speak on the radio. Very interesting... I bought your book. Also very interesting...and I have a book for you. It’s called The Great Wall of China. And it’s written by another William, William Geil.”

Mrs. Hessel-Tiltman and her husband, who had worked in Tokyo as a correspondent for The Times of London, had a large collection of books on Asian history and culture including The Great Wall of China by William Geil, an American missionary who, from 1907 to 1908, became the first to travel along the Wall from end to end. The quantity and quality of the photos in the book stunned Lindesay, but one that included Geil stood out as strangely familiar. Lindesay had once been at the same spot shown in the photo and had photographed himself in the same place, a photo that he’d included in his own book. “This is destiny,” he said. “There we were––two Williams––80 years apart, taking photographs of the same Great Wall view, with William senior and William junior both in frame.”

Then, Lindesay noticed something. The watchtower that stood out in the centre of Geil’s photo had disappeared. He couldn’t find any trace of it in his more recent photo.

 This was not unusual in Lindesay’s experience on the Great Wall. “I’d seen it was gone in many places, and [it] had been for a long time,” he said heavily. “I trekked for 78 days during 1987 between its western and eastern ends. Half of the time I never saw any Great Wall.”

Lindesay wondered: Where had it gone? Where did it still remain? What were the failures, and where were the conservation successes? He sought his own answers.

“I believed that the technique of re-photography could help answer these questions by comparing the Wall still visible today with that preserved in vintage photographs.” With this understanding, he began what he chose to call the “Great Wall Revisited Programme.” 

Alone no more

But this time Lindesay was alone no more. He had the full support of the Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage and Relics and the National Administration of Cultural Heritage and Relics. Shell (China) sponsored the programme. Following the footprints of Geil and other pioneer Great Wall explorers, he has travelled across the vast expanse of northern China, from the Old Dragon’s Head to Yumenguan Pass deep in the Gobi Desert, where he tried to rediscover ruins of the Han Dynasty Wall built 2,000 years ago.

“In Shandan County,” he recalled, “I met the same policeman who interrogated me in the 1980s. The man was now the local police chief. We wined and dined as friends.”

Lindesay has also won the support of many Great Wall experts, including the curators of the Great Wall museums of Qinhuangdao and Jiayuguan the eastern and western ends of the Great Wall.

“They offered me invaluable advice, and helped me locate many sites for re-photography,” he said.

Despite the assistance, the job at hand was as hard as his first Great Wall exploration, if not harder. Lindesay spent a total of 15 years collecting vintage Great Wall photos, including some that were taken more than a century ago, from museums, libraries, bookstores, art galleries and auctions in China and abroad. Numerous sites shown in the old photos are gone, and Lindesay had to visit places again and again to make sure he’d found exactly the right places to portray in his re-photography.

In an article entitled “The Wall of Two Williams” records the difficulties he met:

“Having co-ordinates to key into the memory of my GPS and switched to backtrack mode would have made the task much easier. But the only clues that William Geil provided me with in his century-old caption read ‘Sixty li south of Cha’chienkow’ in which, paradoxically, both distance and name were riddles. The li is simply bizarre; a flexible unit of measurement that has a reputation for being stretchable according to the lie of the land, while all my attempts to pronounce ‘Cha’chienkow” were met with shrugs and stares from Chinese who were naturally unaccustomed to the phonetically alien transliteration method formulated by Wade Giles in the 19th century.”

The Great Wall Revisited Programme, for which Lindesay has travelled 35,000 kilometres across northern China, has met with success and has resulted in an exhibition, a short documentary film and a book, The Great Wall Revisited––From Yumenguan to Old Dragon’s Head in English and Chinese versions.

“This is the first book of mine published in China and in Chinese,” Lindesay said. “But Great Wall re-photography will continue, to show the changes to take place, good or bad. Great Wall conservation is a task for all generations to come, and I believe that re-photography, as an advocacy tool, can definitely help.

“The Great Wall belongs to the entire human race, not only to the Chinese,” Lindesay said. “Who are we if we fail to preserve it?”