Badaling in the snow

Time for another retrospective post. Over the years I’ve visited the Great Wall of China many times, including visits in Summer, Autumn and Winter. Each season offers its own unique perspective of this magnificent structure, surrounded by lush summer greenery, golden Autumn foliage, or shrouded in a blanket of snow.

Here is a retrospective post about my visit during the depth of Winter in January 2003. At the time, I was in Beijing for a global board meeting. My company, Text 100 had just opened its first office in Mainland China, an important strategic expansion of its global reach. As Regional Director for Asia Pacific, I hosted the board for its regular bi-annual meeting, alongside the team from our latest outpost.

Our formal agenda was scheduled to kick off on Monday, 27 January. To facilitate some team bonding, the Board flew in early so we could spend the weekend exploring Beijing together. This included a tour of the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs and, of course, the Great Wall of China.

I vividly recall my early evening flight into Beijing. It was snowing as we came into land. As the plane descended through heavy clouds, the airport finally appeared just a few hundred metres above the ground. All around us snow was falling, the ground was white and snow ploughs were frantically clearing a nearby taxiway. 

As an Antipodean citizen, raised in a temperate climate, the experience of landing on a snow-clad runway was completely new. I’ve enjoyed numerous snowy landings in the years since, especially while living in London. However, I’ll always remember this first experience.

Snow continued to fall for several days. As a result, when the board visited Badaling on Saturday, 25 January, the Great Wall was smothered in inches of fresh snow, with more continuing to fall. Much to my delight, the poor weather worked in our favour. Tourists were few and far between. As a result, we enjoyed sections of the wall almost completely alone – an experience unheard of for Badaling.

Badaling is the traditional destination for visitors to the wall. It’s relatively close to Beijing, less than 80 km northwest, and has plenty of handy tourism infrastructure including cable cars and gondolas. In Summer, Badaling’s daily visitor count is limited by ticket to 65,000 people. In fact, before the ticketing system was introduced in 2019, the count occasionally exceeded 80,000 in a single day.

 

The conditions proved suitably treacherous. At times, we gingerly made our way down the wall's sloping ramparts by tightly gripping handrails installed along its length. In one of the images above, you'll see a couple of tourists performing this death-defying act in the background.

More than once, we lost our footing on the wall’s icy cobblestone paving. More than one board member took an impressive downhill slide on their butt. I’m sure the site would have been closed to visitors had we been in any other country. However, despite the risk, the sight of a snow-bound wall and its surroundings was simply breathtaking. I consider myself lucky to have experienced it.

Afterwards, the group made its way to the Ming Tombs where we enjoyed another almost tourist-free tour of this iconic tourist sight.