From the Great Wall, a high point for connecting cultures
Where I come from, a famous poet, the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, wrote a poem which articulated an aspiration for the future of humanity —
“Where the world has not been broken up into fragments …
By narrow domestic walls … ”
It wasn’t a prayer limited to our country, but was a vision for the “world”.
In a classroom in India some two decades ago, one wintry morn, the discussion revolved around, arguably, the most famous wall on the planet — the Great Wall of China. I have no recollection of how the Great Wall entered our discourse, having at some point dozed off in that postlunch journalism class. And then suddenly, the teacher pointed at me.
“I will continue this conversation if my friend over there promises not to fall asleep,” he said with a smile that put me at ease. I stood up and, in my effort to restore pride and reputation, mumbled out, “Why did they build the Great Wall?”
Everybody burst out laughing, seeing my limp effort to salvage myself, and in the din, my question went unanswered.
So, I said to myself, surely, the Berlin Wall was designed to divide former countrymen and establish two separate countries. People are always building walls when they want to cut off ties. Along the United States border with Mexico, they are actually talking about building a major barrier to keep the Mexicans from crossing over.
And they most certainly didn’t build the Great Wall so that it would be visible from out there in space, and the claim seems at best an exaggeration.
People remembered my question. Years later, a classmate wrote on my Orkut social networking page, writing, “Why did they build Great Wall of China? … I like the way you lisp”. The wall, I realized, would continue to haunt me. There had been walled cities in India, centuries ago, where the Hindus lived, out of a need to feel secure in numbers. Later, once the rulers changed, there were similar walled cities populated by Muslims for similar reasons. Walls seemed always the best way to cut off ties.
But the Great Wall was built to keep intruders, mostly the Mongols, at bay. Nomadic tribes including the Huns were forever swooping down during the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC). But the wall wasn’t built by just one emperor. Many rulers belonging to future dynasties, including the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) and Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), also chipped in.
The construction actually went on for millennia. No wonder the wall boasts a total length of more than 21,000 kilometers. I thought I had done my bit of research and knew all I needed to about the wall. But I hadn’t reckoned for what Chairman Mao Zedong had said: “Until you reach the Great Wall, you’re no hero.”
Now that I was in Beijing, it was just a matter of time before I’d make the customary visit to the Great Wall. So, we set off one fine day, to Mutianyu, the stretch of the wall that is close to Beijing, some 70 km away. There, after a wonderful lunch to keep us going, we were on a ropeway, going up, up, until we reached a vantage point where we realized, unbeknownst to us, we had been photographed on the way up. Thirty yuan ($4.2) later, snapshot in hand, we were finally on the wall.
Centuries ago, it was a wall that kept people away. But today, it is a wall that brings people in. Tourists can actually be on the 4-5 meterwide wall and walk for as long as their legs can take it, stopping to catch a breath at watchtowers, before negotiating the next steep climb.
There were people from every corner of the world — Americans, Europeans, Arabs, Africans and Asians. Every few steps one walked, one got to hear a new language, another dialect, a different accent. It was a revelation to me at Mutianyu — the Great Wall had ceased to be a wall. Instead, it was a bridge connecting people of different cultures. Its watchtowers were now high points from where a cocktail of languages flowed without confusion.