Built to keep out the Mongols, it's now facing a new kind of invader: tourists. Visit a crowd-free stretch and behold the legendary barrier in its natural state. At Badaling, the Great Wall rides the ridgelines like a dragon, its gray brick scales glinting and its crenelated spine writhing. Built at a strategic pass in the mountains north of Beijing, it crosses stout gates, plunges into narrow defiles, climbs back up to the heights and seems to go on forever. Long after this month's Olympic Games end in Beijing, people will flock to Badaling, where seeing is believing in the Ten Thousand Li Long Wall of ancient annals and legend. But contrary to the impression it makes at Badaling, the Great Wall may never have crossed China in one mighty, continuous span, nor is its length precisely known. (Some say it's 4,500 miles, others a mere 3,100.) Experts now think of it as a series of disjointed segments built at different times in the last two millenniums and scattered in a maze all over northern China.
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