It was almost as good as it’s cracked up to be.

Experiencing China’s Great Wall brings you face to face with an extraordinary feat of human endurance and determination. As it snakes away from under you, every stone, stair step and guardhouse shouts grandeur while it whispers of the human suffering that went into making it. The guide called it “the longest cemetery in the world” for those who perished carting the great stones up the mountains on their backs, and who are buried there.

The world’s longest human-made structure, the Great Wall of China stretches over about 4,000 miles from Shanhai Pass in the east to Lop Nur in the west, along the southern edge of Inner Mongolia. It is the largest human-made structure ever built in terms of surface area and mass.

I drove 40 minutes from Beijing and walked from the first to the eighth watchtower from the Badaling entry — a fairly stiff climb that was undertaken by a crowd of all ages, from toddlers to grandparents. In the early stages, a second crowd, of hucksters, confronted me at every turn on the centuries-old monument, shoving postcards and T-shirts in my face and sometimes physically blocking my way. But the salespeople thinned after about the fourth tower, and even the   diehards’ persistence tired by the time I returned. (I took a little under two hours for the round trip, finishing about 4:30 p.m.).

The views from almost every turn were spectacular, if slightly blunted by the pollution into which the wall disappeared in the distance. The structure follows the ridgeline of a woody, steep mountain range, so in the Badaling area it curiously makes a hairpin turn, protecting for China a thin neck of valley. One can see that, were it manned properly, its heights would be a formidable obstacle to an invading army.

The Great Wall is the military side of a regime that at home lived with pomp and elegance. The Forbidden City in the center of Beijing, where the Ming and Qing (pronounced Sheeng) emperors lived and conducted business, is a tangle of gilded rooftops, elaborate decorations and courtyards where the emperor surrounded himself with officials and concubines. The 720,000-square-meter tumble of buildings is punctuated with gates whose entrances reflect the emphasis on hierarchy — a door reserved for the ruler, one for his top officials, one for his wives. The common people were walled out.

In addition to protecting themselves with walls, the emperors harnessed the supernatural in pursuit of mental as well as physical wellbeing. Symbols abound: in colors, in numbers, in figures. Particularly present in the Forbidden City is the magical number 9, from doors (in the form of multiple doorknobs) to number of rooms (it is said to have 9,999).

Next door to the Forbidden City is Behai Park, where the emperors took their ease along a large and gorgeous lake (again, however, the views and color of the water were dimmed because of ever-present air pollution). The walk along the shore is no problem in bad weather — one emperor constructed a 728-meter covered walk, charmingly embellished with more than 8,000 paintings, including stories from legends and novels. The guide said it could serve as a test of modern-day knowledge of Chinese history. Certainly the creative and elegant artwork is mesmerizing.

Modern-day visitors can enjoy the lake by pedaling paddle-boats or riding on a dragon-headed boat, gorgeously decorated like the emperor’s own.

To escape the heat of the summer, later emperors journeyed to the Summer Palace, whose expansion under the Dowager Empress Cixi (Chee-chee) contributed to the demise of the empire, as she funneled defense money into decoration (the empire fell only three years after her death). She was amazingly thorough: The place is a paradise of apartments and decorations, including an overwhelming emphasis on the achievement of harmony — endless artworks symbolically suggest it. She probably needed it, having presided over the demise of two teenage emperors, one her son and his successor her nephew.

The Ming emperors paid equal attention to their pomp after death, designing an enormous park in which they constructed their tombs. This is delightfully approached by a walk lined with large stone animals and larger people — soldiers, courtiers and scholars — who guard the royal remains. The animals are in pairs, one sitting or lying and one standing; they are said to change places at midnight.

For me, these relics, and the stretch of Tiananmen Square, containing Chairman Mao’s tomb, that adjoins the Forbidden City, both hide and reveal the complexities of what it means to be Chinese today. Citizens were obviously painfully proud of the despotic past, during which Cixi would spend more on one lunch than common people saw in their entire lives. And they seemed grateful for and proud of the Communist efforts to modernize their experience, packing them into high-rises and, now, making consumer goods available. (The Chinese have no knowledge of the famous protest the Square; it has been eliminated from their history books.)

And there seemed on a basic level to be little perceived difference between them — the Communists rule like the emperors did, with no input from the common people. (A palace gate once reserved for the emperor now is blocked from visitors and reserved only for the country’s president.) Talking about politics held less interest than speculating about the weather. The one-child-per-couple policy, for example, now 30 years old, seemed widely unquestioned and was acknowledged without controversy to be a good idea.

Locals were intensely proud of next summer’s Olympic Games, which were mentioned in signs everywhere, with official outlets selling memorabilia well ahead of time (even the tourist-site hucksters hawked “Beijing 2008” T-shirts). But yet Beijing was intensely provincial, with only Chinese spoken everywhere and the merest spattering of Caucasians; darker people of color were nowhere to be seen. Almost none of the restaurants I went to had English-speaking staff, and spitting was common on the streets. However, one can be sure that with its customary thoroughness, the Communists will have everything in line by next summer. It should be an extraordinary event, not least for the Chinese.

Happy Traveling!

Captions: 1. The Great Wall, with its spectacular views, is crowded both with visitors and hucksters. 2. The Forbidden City is an extraordinary jumble of buildings that served as the main palace for the emperors. 3. This bedroom in the Summer Palace was a gilded prison for one of the last emperors, who was supplanted by the Dowager Empress. 4. Ming Dynasty emperors developed elaborate statues to guard their remains. 5. Tiananmen Square’s student protests are forgotten by the Chinese; for them, it is  a positive symbol of the country’s advances into the modern age. (Photos by Thomas Simonet)