We ascended through bushes. A cicada could be heard. The August heat was felt on the slope. It smelled like summer trees. The wall was like a snake that snaked around the top of the hill. A cloth of stones with battlements. Some were destroyed and others were almost intact.. From the cliff, behind our back, the world of barbarians was contemplated. It was huge, reached Constantinople, Lisbon or Tenochtitlán. Two birds of prey flew over our heads. We sat down to contemplate that infinite work on the right and left.. There was not a single human being. There wasn't one all morning. We listen to the wind and the silence. We thanked heaven for its threat that left us there alone. Great storm clouds floated in the distance. The rain did not appear, China appeared. And we hear it from its Great Wall. 21.200 kilometers of wall built and rebuilt between the 5th century BC and the 16th century. Up there, I, we understood the before and after.
Beijing has the skin of cities built to be eternal. There are not many in the world: Cairo, Rome, London, Paris, New York, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Moscow, Mexico City… Maybe I left something out. I'm not talking about its current importance., I'm talking about a pose, something that makes them diverse. Its indestructible, cruel, full of contradictions, fascinating. Beijing is, of all of them, the most unknown. It always was. It is today. Why?

“This morning your journey comes to an end., is going to touch a point in the world whose name was indifferent just yesterday, but to which the eyes of Europe have now turned: this sea, that begins to light up so serenely, It is the Yellow Sea and the Gulf of Pechili, “by which you access Beijing”, write french Pierre Loti in his classic work 'The Last Days of Peking'. The journalist arrived in unknown China to cover the Boxer revolts of the 1899 the 1901.
The Chinese population, after decades of abuses and submission by European powers, had rebelled and had carried out a massacre of foreigners to free themselves from their yoke. It's funny, however, that Loti talks about an indifferent place for Europe. “And 1775, Asia was the 80% of the world economy. The combined economies of China and India alone accounted for two-thirds of global output.. In comparison, “Europe was an economic dwarf”, explains Yuval Noah Harari in his book 'Sapiens'. Much of that 80% of the world economy was indifferent to the European powers. China was a power and it was at the same time a mystery.
And 1775, Asia was the 80% of the world economy. The combined economies of China and India alone accounted for two-thirds of global output.. In comparison, Europe was an economic dwarf
There is a legend that claims that China was the first great power to sail and “discover.”, term today reviled, the New World or Australia. The British sailor Gavin Menzies wrote a controversial and famous book where he claims all this: “1421, “The year China discovered the world”. The story tells how a fleet of more than one hundred ships under the command of the explorer Zheng He set out to contact all places and make the barbarians pay tribute.. That philosophy comes from the cornerstone of Chinese thought, Tianxia, Which means “everything under heaven”. According to that idea, The Chinese emperor must rule everything under the clouds, which includes China and everything that is not China which is considered the land of the barbarians.
The ships set sail to conquer the world and when they returned years later, the emperor who had sent them, Hongxi, was dead, and the new, Zhu Zhanji, He was afraid that strangers would contaminate his kingdom.. “Zhu Zhanji allowed Admiral Zheng He to perform his ‘swan song’: one last trip to Mecca, but after his death, in 1435, complete xenophobia was unleashed. All voyages of the treasure fleets were interrupted, and the first of a series of imperial edicts prohibited foreign trade and foreign travel. Any merchant who tried to carry out foreign trade activities would be judged as a pirate and executed.. for a while, even learning a foreign language or teaching Chinese to foreigners was prohibited”, writes Menzies.
a century later, remembers the Canadian Timothy Brooks in his fabulous book The Great State, the lock was final: "In 1525, the Jianjing emperor closed its coasts; not only those in Guangdong, but those of all China. "No ship with more than one mast could now go to sea.".

China had built a wall on land, the one through which I walked 4 August 2023, and a wall by sea. He did it out of fear, out of arrogance and contempt. “The country's neighbors were so extremely weak that the Chinese people had come to have the feeling that they were the whole world”, writes the Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra in his book “From the ruins of empires”.
That led the country to close in on itself.. It became something exotic, in a giant with feet of clay. “Lum, perhaps the only Chinese in London in 1793, It aroused considerable curiosity from which King George III did not escape.. Their paths crossed when the monarch walked through Hyde Park (…) Delighted with the meeting, the king is supposed to have exclaimed: 'As? A man from China! A man from China! How is it??”, narra Mishra.
Lum, perhaps the only Chinese in London in 1793, It aroused considerable curiosity from which King George III did not escape.
The date surprises again. At that time China was an economic power that would soon see the ships of the barbarians arrive at its shores and would discover that Tianxia was a very narrow world. Until then it had allowed few contacts. Portuguese and Spanish missionaries, any Dutch or British commercial representation, but they were always expelled or allowed to dock far away so as not to contaminate their customs.. This time it was different. The arrival of the English first, and of the French, Americans, Portuguese… later, It turned out to be a nightmare that they couldn't understand..
The Opium Wars, where the British forced the Chinese to open their ports and trade drugs, and the subsequent Japanese conquests, They caught their elites off guard. “El propio Liang Qichao (Reformist politician, Chinese intellectual and journalist) learned of China's modest position in the world when in the spring of 1890 “He found some Chinese books about the West in Beijing.”, Mishra writes.

That shattered all the mystique that China had generated abroad for centuries.. The country of porcelain and silks that Marco Polo described was now a homeland of dirty lazy and savage citizens. Their diaspora at the beginning of the 20th century took them all over the world. I found his footprint in South Africa, Mexico or Peru. They were poor immigrants, mistreated, those who were considered to have pernicious customs. “Addition to opium (ironically, a manufacture of british trade), women's foot binding, ignorance and hostility towards the outside world and a sadistic attachment to torture (or so it was believed) They turned China into a pariah and the Chinese into beings undeserving of civilized treatment.”, remember Brooks.
In Mexico City I have seen an exhibition at the Museum of Tolerance where they narrated the hunt for Chinese that took place during the Mexican Revolution.. “Some Chinese were castrated and branded with hot irons.”, I explained. The exhibition showed how 1911, in the city of Torreón, was massacred 303 Chinese. The orientals, many arrived from San Francisco, They lived under apartheid like the one that the black population suffered in South Africa. And 1923, A law was passed that prevented marriages between Mexicans and Chinese.
They narrated the hunt for Chinese that took place during the Mexican Revolution. "Some Chinese were castrated and branded with hot irons"
Also in the old mines of Johannesburg they were treated like animals. Many Chinese were taken to extract gold in the South African Transvaal. They were whipped tied to the ground and they were even subjected to a punishment from China that consisted of being tied by their ponytails and naked to a stake in the ground for hours..

The rest is history. China learned its lesson. Today its growing fleet sets sail across the seas again. It expands by creating its own ports around the globe. He will not make the mistake of locking himself behind a wall again.. His ambitious Silk Road project, commercial and military, wants to finish what Zheng He started six centuries ago. Today the walls are built by others.
And all that was understood in that wonderful stretch of the Great Wall, Palongshan, a 160 kilometers from the capital, where you could hear the cicadas. We wanted to get away from the reconstructed sections crowded with visitors. And we arrived at that strange space where a guard told us that we could not pass.. There was a threat of strong storms and it was dangerous. But Tony, our driver, a Chinese who speaks perfect Italian, he replied: “don't worry, “I know a way.”. And that road reached an imposing wall. And that wall summed up China. or so I think, because no one from outside seems to understand this country. “This Imperial City, however, It was one of the last refuges of the unknown and the marvelous on Earth., one of the last avenues of the most secular humanity, incomprehensible to us and even a little mythical”, Loti concludes his work.