At 6.30am, the morning propaganda reveille starts from the village loudspeakers in Dazhenyu, watched over from dizzy heights by the stout ramparts of the Great Wall of China, which has seen its share of dynasties come and go. Out in the village, cockerels are crowing and there is a smell of "bing" pancakes being cooked as the sun beats down on the Great Wall high above.
The loudspeaker message praising President Xi Jinping's New Silk Road project linking Asia and Europe is followed up with a blast of clarinet music by Kenny G.
The arrival of autumn has brought rare rain showers over the past few days and there is a sense of abundance, as persimmons, apples and pears weigh down the trees and the narrow lanes are lined with spiky chestnut husks.
Times are changing in Dazhenyu, which translates as “big hazel-tree gully”, even though the Great Wall remains a constant. Here the Great Wall hails from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and is known for its lofty location, snaking along the mountain tops for nine kilometres and broken at regular intervals by dozens of watchtowers.
At a crumbling guardhouse near the village, an old man sells almonds and walnuts to Nike-clad daytrippers from the capital, 80km to the south, eager to escape the pollution for a few precious hours. Cracking walnuts and eating jujube red dates, the backpackers are a vision of New China, but stories from turbulent epochs are etched in the bricks of the Great Wall.
During the Sino-Japanese war, which lasted from 1931 to 1945 and is still remembered by older people in the village, Dazhenyu housed underground hospitals where those fighting the Japanese invaders were tended. Walking in the hills, you can stumble on a clearing with a white memorial stone, complete with a revolutionary red star, to honour a fallen hero.
Much of the daily life in the city revolves around the town square with its basketball net, ping-pong table and selection of exercise machinery geared towards the elderly. There are actually five villages in the area with nearly 1,000 villagers, but the numbers are dwindling and those who remain are getting older. Elderly residents sit on leather armchairs, many wearing the blue overalls and tunics from the days of Mao Zedong.
Dazhenyu is not immune to the enormous demographic changes taking place in China; young people have abandoned the village to work in the capital, leaving their offspring behind in the care of their parents.
The village’s relative proximity to the city means the children get to see their parents more regularly than so many of the 100 million “left-behind children” in China, but during the working week, the absence of young and middle-aged adults in Dazhenyu is striking, as elderly grandparents escort their children home from school.
A good number of villagers have arable land near their houses and other plots up the mountainside, which can be difficult to access during the winter, and are also tough to hike up and down from as farmers get older.
Tourism is becoming increasingly important. Farmers rent out part of their farmhouses to families, foreign and increasingly middle-class Chinese, who use them as weekend getaway destinations.
The Dazhenyu section is 20km west of the popular tourist access point to the Great Wall at Mutianyu, which is far enough to discourage most coach tours but still makes it popular with daytrippers in their own cars.
The Great Wall is wild at Dazhenyu and, while the government has a raft of rules governing preservation of the structure, it is simply too big to maintain proper oversight. At one point walking up the slope to the Great Wall near the village, you pass a large amphitheatre-like structure, filled with wheat. It is not immediately obvious what its function is.
More than 20 centuries old, the Great Wall once stretched for thousands of kilometres – some reckon there were 20,000 kilometres of wall all told – through China, from Gansu in the west to the city of Shanhaiguan in the east, where it just reaches the Bohai Sea.
Building it took place sporadically and in many diverse areas from the third century BC onwards, but the Ming era was the busiest, with nearly 6,300km of wall built to keep the Mongols out. It succeeded in stopping numerous Mongol raids in the mid-16th century.
For all this frenzied construction, the Manchu Qing eventually marched unopposed through the Great Wall to establish a dynasty that only collapsed with start of the republic era in 1911.
Nearly a third of the Great Wall has disappeared over time, overgrown with vegetation, worn down by the weather or taken away by farmers to build houses. The Great Wall here though is amazingly intact, impossibly steep and overgrown. However the exploding domestic tourism market means more pressure on authorities to maintain this beautiful structure and ensure the ramparts keep gazing down on the breathtaking changes in the gully below.
