SUMMER 2012
Adviser Update
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P14.V53.I01
Page 2B
This is probably not the first Penn State gnome to visit the Great Wall, nor will it be the last.
My, what a Great Wall you have
By BRANDON TAYLOR
June 25, 2009
Richard Nixon took a lot of
flack when he stood before the
Great Wall in 1972 and proclaimed “This is a great wall.” Politicians and people of all nationalities were stunned, believing the
U.S. president was either unimpressed or ill prepared for his trip
to the Chinese mountains. Gazing
upon the wall with my own eyes, I,
too, was left speechless and realized how the most powerful man
in the world could have made such
a nondescript and seemingly obvious statement.
The Great Wall, simply put,
is great. To call it anything else,
such as the Awesome Wall or the
Extremely Long Wall, would be
inappropriate, understated and
inconsiderate of the time and
effort put into making this penultimate defensive structure.
Construction of the wall began
as early as the fifth century
B.C. and was expanded during
the Ming Dynasty in the 1400s.
Stretching 4,000 miles from the
Yellow Sea to Inner Mongolia, the
Great Wall is the largest manmade structure ever built. Contrary to popular belief, the wall
is not visible from the moon and
is barely able to be seen with the
naked eye from low earth orbit.
Nor is the Great Wall one continuous structure. Over time, multiple
wall segments became somewhat
interconnected, but now, after
hundreds of years of deterioration,
numerous segments scatter the
mountains north of Beijing.
The Great Wall adventure
I found myself on had actually
started the day after arriving in
Beijing. I’d done research beforehand and read about the sections
of the Great Wall to avoid. Ba Da
Ling, while relatively close to Beijing, was over-touristed, with steel
rails installed along restored sections of t