Let’s say you want to see the Great Wall during your visit to Beijing, but you don’t want to see the same parts of the wall that every other tourist visits - Badaling, Mutianyu, Huanghua, and others.  Let’s say too that you want to spend time at the beach while you’re in China to avoid the usual tourist grind.  Where do you go?  Well, a three-hour drive along a stunningly good expressway east from Beijing will bring you to a spot on the Bohai Sea that will nicely meet your needs.  First, the Great Wall.  This is the gate at Shanhaiguan, through which troops long ago could pass through the Great Wall.  A short distance south of here, the Great Wall ends in the sea; a short distance north of here, it rises dramatically into the hills.

An original section of the Great Wall in Shanhaiguan.  Like much of the “good” parts of the Great Wall today, most of it is reconstructed, using the original bricks when possible.  This section, however, is apparently the real thing.

The watchtower above the pass.  Shanhaiguan is a small, wall-enclosed town most famous for its pass through the Great Wall.  This particular pass is famous because it is here in 1644 that Manchu invaders poured through to invade China, ending the Ming dynasty and establishing the Qing dynasty in its place.  This garrison town and its part of the wall were built here during the Ming dynasty, in 1381, specifically to keep the Manchus out.

A small museum can be found here with some items of interest, including weaponry, uniforms, and pieces of the wall from long ago.  This is an old unglazed roofline tile character.  As no doubt noticeable in many of my other China photographs, these are usually glazed a golden orange color.

Eaves under the watchtower above the pass at Shanhaiguan.

This is high atop the Great Wall very near the pass at Shanhaiguan.  An area is roped off for what appears to be archery practice, I assume for a tourist demonstration to take place later.  At least I hope that’s what it’s for; bullseye targets would have been less disconcerting than the head-and-shoulders targets used here.

Watchtower windows, from where those arrows would have been fired in the past.  The spot in the middle of each shutter, made to look like the eye of a very large bird, was used to scare smaller birds away from the tower.

A final look at the pass through the Great Wall, known as the First Pass Under Heaven, also known as the East Gate, in Shanhaiguan.

The Great Wall, at least this section of it, ends a short distance south of that pass, at the Bohai Sea.  The wall here is called Laolongtou, Old Dragon’s Head.  From here, the Great Wall stretches thousands of miles back into China.

Beyond the flags and trees is the Chenghai Pavilion, a two-story structure visited by the major Qing dynasty emperors.  It actually sits atop the Great Wall, just before its drop down to Old Dragon’s Head.

The Old Dragon’s Head.  Though many think that this is the easternmost end of the Great Wall, it isn’t.  North of Shanhaiguan, the wall splits in two directions; one section heads west toward Beijing and beyond, and the other section heads northeast into Liaoning province and then southeast to end far away at the North Korean border.  By the way, this isn’t the beach I alluded to earlier; that comes later.

Here’s that section of the Great Wall that stretches north of Shanhaiguan into the Hebei Mountains, at Jiaoshan.  Feel like having a climb?

Fortunately, a cable lift can now take visitors to the top of the mountain, allowing photographs like this one of a piece of the Great Wall.  A visitor can be seen climbing into a window on the wall.

The view from near the top, back toward Shanhaiguan and the Bohai Sea in the distant haze.

A large section of the wall near the top of Jiaoshan.  There were actually a fair number of Chinese tourists making this climb.

After that long climb, it’s definitely time to relax on a beach, so head to nearby Beidaihe.  This is China’s most famous seaside resort town, crowded during the summer, abandoned otherwise.  For over half a century, China’s top leadership came here to strategize during summer retreats and other Chinese VIPs came here to vacation with their families, but those official practices were ended a couple of years ago.

Today, a massive number of Russians - and a number of massive Russians - vacation in Beidaihe.  Signs throughout the resort town are in both Chinese and Russian, and even the “Western” hotel where I stayed was primarily Russian.

The beach at Beidaihe.  It’s not the kind of crowd you find at a Western beach.  The Chinese tend to be fully clothed or at least well-covered, and while most concede to wearing sandals, plenty of men wear leather shoes along with the rest of their business attire.  Russians, on the other hand, tend to wear bikinis and speedos, particularly when you wish they wouldn’t.