China’s Great Wall and the Englishman who has dedicated his life to preserving it
- William Lindesay has run the length of the wall, documented its destruction and discovered a new dynasty of builders
- After three decades of wall-based research and adventures in China, he and his sons have turned their attention to Mongolia
Wall to wall: I was born in 1956, in Wallasey, England. If you take a ferry across the Mersey, as the song goes, you’re there. Significantly, the ferry goes past Liverpool’s Shanghai Bund-like waterfront to a place with “wall” in its name, so perhaps I was destined for China.
I was schooled at St Aidan’s where the headmaster, Reverend J.P. Macmillan, or “Maccie” as he was known to us, maintained an unconventional approach to teaching. Every week we’d go on excursions, visiting churches, castles or farms. This engendered an appreciation of learning by experience – fieldwork, essentially.
We were also taught subjects without boundaries: history, geography and science were fused into one, which has helped me take a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the Great Wall. Maccie always told us to have three books by our bedsides, a Bible, a prayer book and an atlas. I first saw the wall marked as a symbol in my bedside atlas. I must have been 11 when I told my class that I was going to China to see the Great Wall.
Egyptian detour: After visiting the British Museum to see the Tutankhamen exhibition, in 1972, I got an early taste for Egyptology. At university in Liverpool, however, I chose to study geography and geology. I graduated in 1979 and managed to get a job in an oilfield in the Gulf of Suez. We did a 28 days on and off schedule.
When the oil rig workers went home, I explored the monuments of Egypt, where I was eventually adopted by two American archaeologists. They loved what they did, whereas most of the oil rig workers hated their job. This made me imagine a life where I could do what I love and make a living.