The days and nights I have spent with William, Qi and his family in their farmhouse in the shadow of the Great Wall are among the most vivid and memorable of my life and of my years in China. Whether we were around the fire in the winter, nestling mugs of hot tea and jostling for space on the sofa with Hadrian (the black labrador, who was William’s 60th birthday gift) or sitting under the stars of a summer evening sky with the breeze gently rustling the leaves of the ginkgo trees in the courtyard and the jagged outline of the Wall just visible in the hills beyond, William’s stories of his adventures on the Wall have held me and his many guests entranced.
In this book, William tells the second part of his extraordinary story. Following his solo run along China’s Great Wall and marriage to Qi, they return to China with their first born, Jimmy, and begin in earnest to preserve and protect the Great Wall - the Wild Wall - of China, to research and share its story. It is a story of highs - meeting the Queen and the award of an OBE and recognition in China for his conservation work as the founder of International Friends of the Great Wall - but also of challenges overcome, of peasants throwing bricks with deadly aim at visiting philanthropists and of a very real brush with death in the Gobi desert.
Woven through all this is a telling of China’s social history as the family, joined by Tommy born in 2000 and Hadrian the dog in 2016, experience life in fast-growing China through the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the worst of the airpocalypse.
We meet too the ‘terrible and terrific’ guests who have visited the farmhouse over three decades: from the worse-is-better Spartans to Joanna Lumley ‘a(chǎn)s beautiful inside as she is outside’. Spoiler alert: the Dutch stand out as the best guests.