Xinhua News Agency reported earlier in September that a preservation and protection project is well under way. As reported earlier an ambitious three years preservation project for the Great Wall has been launched by the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

According to the official, preservers has finished field survey earlier, and the project is expected to be finished in two or three years.

Preservation and protection will go to a 2-km-long section thatlocates in the Beibao Village, Qingshuihe County, which was built in the Ming Dynasty (1368 A.D. to 1644), government official told Xinhua.

The Great Wall in Hebei and especially the Beijing area have been well described and documented, however not much information regarding the Great Wall in Liaoning province is available. Some books show an inaccurate map but many still show the Great Wall to end at Shanhaiguan in Hebei, and the same goes for most map – even maps of Liaoning seldom shows the wall or only a few kilometres close to Shanghaiguan.

Living in the city of Tangshan (Hebei province) I only have a two hours drive to the Hebei/Liaoning border, so it’s my goal in the next few years to further explore the Liaoning Great Wall. Much of it has long disappeared because the stones and brick have been used in other constructions or because the quality of the wall simply didn’t allow it to survive for hundreds of years.

Last weekend I started my quest to explore the Great Wall in Liaoning going to an area northeast of the old fortified city of Qiansuo and located in the shadow of Mount Sanshan.

The first people we asked how to get to the wall told us to go to Jiumenkou 20 kilometres away, even though if they had turned their head they would have seen the Great Wall a few hundreds meters away. Others did know about the Great Wall and showed us to a path leading to the wall. Unfortunately, the area was covered with cornfields making it very difficult to locate any path and finding the right path was even more difficult. When the weather deteriorated, I decided to come back another time when the crops have been harvested and the path should be more clearly visible.

There seems to be a watchtower just south of the wall, east of the road, however this might also be related to the monastery located on the opposite side of the road. The monastery have been rebuild since the Google Earth images was taken, and large parts of the wall seems to have disappeared since then or maybe just concealed by the crops.

Because of a vacation back in Denmark and a wedding in a few weeks, this post have under way for a long time but here it is.

The Taolinkou area northeast of Tangshan has long been on my list of places to go. Especially because it seems to be possible to hike for a long time in a fairly deserted area, even though the wall is in poor conditions at some places.

In the middle of July I made an attempt to reach a specific part of the Taolinkou Great Wall but was first stopped by a big outdoor market which totally blocked the road and made it impossible to continue. An attempt to find an alternative road to the area also failed because of the quality of the road, which in the mountains suddenly became very bad and the big stones threatened to damage the undercarriage of the car.

Luckily the bad road was located very close to another part of the Great Wall, which is connected to the Taolinkou Great Wall, so even though it was not possible to reach the intended section this day it way still possible to explore some nice Hebei Great Wall.

A closer look in the area reveal that the wall splits in two for a short stretch and then meet again on the next mountain. This might be to strengthen the defensive force of the pass here or maybe it is a result of different ideas in different building periods during the Ming dynasty.

The north part seems older with no visible watchtowers although Google Earth images suggest at least one watchtower, while the southern part of the wall still has intact watchtowers. This might suggest that the northern part was build prior to the southern part but no information regarding this area has been found so far.

The weather is too hot for any whole day trips at the moment (at least in my opinion) so the idea was mainly to go there and get a feeling of the difficulties and challenges in the area to help plan future trips, and this is most likely an area I will return to later.

Entrance price: free

Date of visit: July 12, 2008