The Great Wall Revisited_William Lindesay_9780674031494_Harvard University Press

A journey along the Great Wall in the past and present, this landmark volume offers an extraordinary portrait of perhaps the world’s most famous structure. Carrying his camera and a file of vintage photographs—the earliest dating from 1871—author-photographer William Lindesay traveled across Northern China for three years, searching for settings where the Great Wall could be examined in the past and present, side by side. The result, The Great Wall Revisited, presents seventy-two of the most elucidating then- and-now comparisons. This glossy dossier opens out as an extraordinary journey from the Jade Gate in northwest China’s Gobi Desert to Old Dragon’s Head on the Yellow Sea.

Far more than a romantic look at the Great Wall of yesteryear, this stunning, artfully crafted volume also contains concise histories of the sites that Lindesay’s images revisit. Colorful literary impressions composed by earlier visitors, juxtaposed with contemporary eyewitness accounts of change traced along the Wall, afford a sense of history unfolding and time inexorably creeping along the contours of this enduring monument to human ingenuity.