The Great Wall of China, built to defend the Middle Kingdom from the barbarians of Central Asia, is undeterred by any landscape on its course from the remote fortress outpost of Jiayuguan to its seaside terminus of Old Dragon Head, Shanhaiguan. A serpent of mud in the Gobi tracts of Gansu, it skirts the sand seas of the advancing Tengger and Ordos Deserts, crossing the Yellow River twice, becoming stone-blocked in traversing the snowy Yanshan of Hebei, finally to emerge on the coast of the Yellow Sea.

In his journey from the desert to the sea William Lindesay ran for 2,470 kilometres to become the first foreign conqueror of China's most bizarre remnant of xenophobia. Unescorted, he felt the Wall's ambivalence, sometimes as an opponent to master, at other times a familiar to feel at one with among the many peasant farmers who took him to their hearts, fed and sheltered him and wrote their simple messages of encouragement in his diaries.

The Wall proved a dramatic and testing companion, not only of his mental and physical stamina, but also of his single-minded determination. For all but eighty kilometres of his route was through closed and forbidden territory, making it necessary to use guile and ingenuity to side-step the relentless bureaucrats of the Public Security Bureau. This lends an element of suspense to the journey, but also, through his struggles, a sense of identity with the soldiers of the imperial frontier, the merchants of the Silk Road, the heroes of the Long March and the people of China today who extended their hands in friendship.

William Lindesay's resourcefulness is on a scale to match his undertaking. Surviving illness and injury, extremes of temperature, shepherd dogs, bubonic plague, arrest and deportation, he finally triumphs, and this is the record of his remarkable achievement.

Editorial Review by Publishers Weekly
British runner Lindesay longs to be a traveler in the grand manner, admitting that he was drawn to make his grueling 2500-kilometer run along the length of China's Great Wall because it was ``the last great adventure opportunity.'' This chronicle of his two-year obsession describes two ill-planned and abortive attempts ending in sickness and retreat and his final successful journey. Lindesay battles bureaucracy, blisters and the elements, all of which seem bent on preventing his attainment of an avowedly quixotic goal. Along the route, he meets his future wife and gains the rare privilege of seeing behind the facade of a totalitarian state and into the faces of its people. Well-written and entertaining, the book should appeal to runners, who vicariously will share the author's travails and cheer his determination and ultimate good fortune. Armchair tourists will enjoy the wealth of information about the Middle Kingdom and the daily lives of its citizens. However, Lindesay's use of Briticismsstet/rl and his right-wing politics (he presents AIDS to some inquisitive Chinese as a gay disease) will deter many readers from following this intrepid athlete the distance.

Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review by a reader
"If at first you don't succeed , try, try again" is an old adage we frequently laugh at, but in Will's case, it lead to success. Will, a long-distance runner from Britain, wanted to be the first person to run the length of the Great Wall of China. It took him several years, but he finally accomplished this, but not without encountering serious illness, traveling through areas closed to foreigners and winding up in jail (which he subsequently broke out of) and eventual deportation from China. This is a good read about a heartwarming experiernce, espescially about hardships some people must go through to reach their dreams. The hardbound copy, which I don't think is available in the United States, contains some photos (Chinese authorities confiscated most of his film); the paperback book does not. Will has a strong interest in the Great Wall, and since he moved to Beijing permanently, spends many weekends camping out on the Wall. This has lead to another book on the Great Wall, this one on camping out on it. That book should be out in the fall of 1998. I first met Will in the fall of 1994 when I moved to Beijing to work as a copy editor for China Daily; Will already was working there. But even if Will weren't a friend, I would still recommend this book for anyone with a spirit of adventure or who just wants to share in this marvelous, inspirational adventure.

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