Great Wall reviews

"As a child I became interested in all things China because of a late 70’s TV documentary. The programme followed West Bromwich Albion who became the first British football team to play in China. The players hated it but I was mesmerised. The place that really stood out was the Great Wall. On a rather strained tour of the wall, one of the players, John Trewick, said



'Impressive, isn't it? But once you've seen one wall, you've seen them all!'



My dad, a builder, assured me that this wasn’t the case and tried to quantify to a 9 year old how long it would have taken for him to build such a wall. If it would have taken my dad 1000’s of years I decided that I had to see it…. It took me a good few years to get there and I wasn’t disappointed. The Great Wall stretches for 1000’s of miles, it isn’t continuous and it cannot be seen from space. Parts of it are built from stone, and other parts from packing down clay. I’ve been fortunate enough to walk alongside it with a camel train in the Inner Mongolian desert; I’ve climbed along un-restored, wild parts of the wall where it is easy to imagine being back in the days of the Emperors and visited the tourist centre at Badaling where a never ending supply of Chinese tourists flock to see one of their countries’ great treasures. The Great Wall is exactly what it says on the tin. It is great and it is a wall, however I can honestly say that even when you have seen one part of the Great Wall you haven’t seen it all"

Simon Grove - Head of Product