Great Wall of China -- Travel 365 -- National Geographic

October 1, 2012

Great Wall of China

Photograph by Dorothea Schmid, laif/Redux

The Mutianyu section of the Great Wall of China snakes through fall foliage near Beijing. A recent mapping project found that the entire Great Wall structure—which is actually a network of fortifications built over some 2,000 years—spans about 5,500 miles from the Korean border west into the Gobi desert. Of that total, 3,889 miles were actual wall; the rest were trenches and natural defensive barriers.

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