Sickle and garbage bag in hand, 66-year-old patroller Zhang Heshan steps onto the Great Wall he has been keeping a watchful eye on ever since he was a young man of only 23. Every summer day, he kicks off his rounds at the crack of dawn.

He shares his experiences and breathtaking views on Douyin, China's leading short video platform, almost every day and has gained about 400,000 followers so far. In the videos, he walks around the illustrious structure at a brisk pace, introducing the plants and scenery along the way with an upbeat voice.

The part he patrols belongs to the ancient wall's Chengziyu section located in Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province. It is about 6 km long, dotted with 23 watchtowers. Every day, he spends more than five hours collecting garbage, pulling weeds and sometimes telling legends of the Great Wall to tourists.

He has worn out over 200 pairs of shoes and the distance he's covered over the past four decades almost equals 2.5 times that of the equator—the latter being about 40,075 km in circumference. "I know the wall's every detail in this area," he said in one of his Douyin videos. "To protect the wall is as important as protecting my own house."

Commitment

Born in a village in the port city of Qinhuangdao, right at the foot of this once great military defense project built by successive Chinese dynasties, the firm determination to protect the wall runs through his veins. With his family claiming to be descendants of the Yiwu Army, a military unit from Zhejiang Province in east China that became the main construction force of the Great Wall during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Zhang grew up listening to the myriad of tales surrounding the structure's history.

Its bricks are part of his personal foundation.

His first started "patrolling" the Great Wall in the late 1970s. Back in those days, it was common for locals to take bricks from the wall to build pigpens next to their own houses or dig up herbs from its cracks to sell at the market. When Zhang tried to stop them from doing so, he was met with disgruntlement.

"They said it was none of my business," he said. "But I knew I was doing something right." As a man in his 20s, he was supposed to be putting bread on the table, instead of wandering around the wall's different sections for zero pay. Nobody supported his good intentions, except for his wife, who made ends meet by selling snacks.

In December 1987, the Great Wall was listed on UNESCO's World Heritage List, but by that point, many sections had suffered severe damage and were in urgent need of renovation—and protection.

The building of the Great Wall dates back to the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046-771 B.C.), over 3,000 years ago. It served as a military defense to fend off invaders. Since then, many dynasties followed up by constructing new wall sections, right up to China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911).

Many of its parts we can still visit today are from the Ming Dynasty and the remains of the wall now cover 15 provincial-level regions. Its total length exceeds 21,196 km, according to the National Cultural Heritage Administration of China.

In the early 2000s, people living along the structure were encouraged to serve as its guardians. In 2003, the first group of Great Wall protectors officially took their positions—with a monthly salary. The income they received varied based on the average salary of different places.

Zhang was part of the first group. "To become an officially recognized protector of the Great Wall means a lot to me," he said. "Every time I sit there, watching the sunrise or sunset, I can feel that maybe my ancestors also sat in that very same spot watching that very same scene. It's thrilling."

Youth power

A growing number of young people have joined the protection efforts. Ma Yao, born in 1988, was on a mapping team at Tencent, an IT giant in China, when he got the idea to snap 360-degree panoramic photos of the Great Wall. At that time, the team was working on a digitalization project to collect 360-degree panoramic images of street sceneries all across China.

"The Great Wall is always the first thing I notice every time I look at a map of China," Ma said. "It zigzags from east to west. So I figured, why not offer a full-scale picture of it and let it come alive this way?"

But the undertaking was easier said than done. Many of the wall's sections are located in remote areas. Sometimes, it would take the photographers several hours to climb a mountain, take the pictures and then spend another couple of hours climbing down. Of the 50 photographers joining the project, only two stayed; the mission ended up taking 1.5 years, culminating in a photo collection capturing 900 km of the Great Wall.

In summer 2014, Ma and his partners stumbled across a tiny village "hidden" at the foot of the structure along the Yellow River. The families all go by the same family name: Tuo, a rare one in China. They are from a minority group whose ancestors' trek into the vast plain area of China was eventually blocked by the Great Wall, so they simply decided to settle down at its foot. Their descendants have lived there to this very day.

Ma considers this story to be the most touching one he's encountered on his mission. "The Great Wall for many is 'just' a world wonder, one far removed from daily life," Ma said. "These stories allow the wonder to connect with us, make us feel it is alive and breathing."

In 2015, he joined the Tencent Charity Foundation, which launched a specific project called Great Wall Protection. The endeavor attracted many IT talents and heritage renovation experts. They adopted digital technologies and outlined detailed renovation plans for each and every individual brick in specific sections. Over the past eight years, they have completed the renovation of the 744-meter-long section of the Jiankou Great Wall in Beijing's suburban Huairou District, and the 1,137-meter-long section of the Xifengkou Great Wall in Hebei Province.

In July 2021, the extended 44th session of UNESCO's World Heritage Committee reviewed and approved the Report on the State of Conservation of the Great Wall, highly appraising the active and effective measures taken by the Chinese Government in the protection of the Great Wall and rating the Great Wall as a demonstration case of World Heritage protection and management.

"There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley," English novelist William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) once wrote. Over the course of millennia, the wondrous structure has served as an immeasurable source of inspiration and fascination.

"The Great Wall bears many wonderful stories and what we need to do is to deliver these stories to more people, in more ways," Ma said. 

(Print Edition Title: Guardians of Greatness)

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon

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