Great Wall Websites

Here are my links to worthy Great Wall websites. I've tried to include a few informative (or maybe ill-informed!) words on each, and some pictures to whet your appetites. Because of the pictures, this page may take a long time loading... Sorry!

Note to self: A text-only version of this page?

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Britannica has a longish article on the wall here - it's pretty heavy on the history of which parts of the wall were built when, but they all blur into one if you don't know where the places mentioned are (maps are good, guys!). Anyway, there are seven pictures with the article, and I've included the thumbnails here. I particularly like the fifth one...

Journey To Beijing

Graham Hawker's Journey To Beijing is a very enjoyable account of this man's visit to Beining in 1994. It's worth reading the whole thing, but in particular here's the page about the day he spent at the wall.

Unfortunately the pictures on the site are all fairly small. I'll include just one here - because it's so scary:

China Experience

Marilyn Shea's China Experience has information and travelog-type stuff on various aspects of China including, yes you guessed it, The Great Wall, which a few pictures on this page too.

Secrets Of The Great Wall

The Discovery Channel has a pretty cool site, Secrets Of The Great Wall. It's all very "discovery channel" in that there's not a great deal of depth but it's easy to get your head round - which I suppose I can't moan about given my earlier comments re: Britannica's article. ;-)

It's a little short on decent wall pictures, but makes up for it with some satellite images and (on the main page) some clever little "360" pictures which you can pan around in, to see the entire view from one spot. Sweet! So sweet, in fact, that I think I'll link straight to them from here:

ChinaVista Virtual Tour

ChinaVista has a Virtual Tour of the Great Wall, but the only way to navigate through it is one page at a time. Tedious, especially as it's a fairly slow site anyway! However, apart from that it's not half bad - a few nice pictures over several regions. All the same, a contents page would make it about twenty times more appealing, so here's one I prepared earlier:

Front Page (with cheesy pic!)
Map of the Great Wall
Badaling Section
Badaling At Sunset
Badaling By Night (nice)
Pass of Conscripted Labourers (Juyongguan)
Carvings at Pass of Conscripted Labourers
Cloud Terrace at Psas of Conscripted Labourers (nice)
Mutianyu Section
Battle Forts (groovy greenery)
Mutianyu Section
Jinshanling Section
Jinshanling Section
Jinshanling Section
Simatai Section
Beacon Tower
The Great Wall in Four Seasons

Great Wall of China Lesson

Dim Sum's Great Wall of China Lesson includes a pretty good picture page. We've seen several of these pictures on pages mentioned earlier, but it's definitely worth checking out for the others.

In particular, here are some pretty lights on the wall:

Miscellaneous Others

There are 150 Great Wall Links on this page, apprently. Blimey.

Walk The Wall has some good black & white pictures of one section of the wall, and (excellently) a series of 360 degree panoramas (here).

This page dispels the myth that the wall is the only man-made structure visible from space. Groovy.

This Art Of China page has 4 nice pictures - but they seem strangely familiar. :-)

There's probably nothing you haven't seen elsewhere new on Hunter's page, and the background's bright red! Yuck!