Adventures on the Great Wall

This is a tale of two Williams, their lives separated by more than a century but whose destinies are intertwined through their abiding fascination with one of the pinnacles of human achievement, the Great Wall of China.

William Lindesay, "Young William", is British, and one of the world's leading authorities on the Wall, while William Geil, "Old William", was an American and the first man to explore the Great Wall from one end to the other.

Young William has just launched an exhibition in Beijing's elegant Imperial College & Temple of Confucius Museum, which features the newly discovered diaries, photographs and other artefacts belonging to Old William, a missionary and explorer.

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Lindesay was inspired by images of the Great Wall as an 11-year-old boy in Wallasey, Wirral, and he ran the length of Hadrian's Wall a few years later, a sign of things to come. While studying at Manchester he decided to take things further. He first explored the Wall in 1987, was arrested nine times and deported once. It was a different China to the one that is today allowing, and indeed encouraging, his exhibition to go ahead.

He came across a copy of Geil's book on the Great Wall in 1990, and believes that the American was the first individual to have explored the entire Wall, at the turn of the last century. Lindesay is the founder and director of a non-governmental organisation called International Friends of the Great Wall, and the exhibition focuses on his "re-photography" work, a process where he retakes photographs of the precise location where an original photograph was shot. It's a stunning exercise in documenting change.

Lindesay had already written Alone on the Great Wall, an account of his own 1,500-mile excursion in 1987, when he set out four years ago to locate and rephotograph the same sites that Geil had photographed. "It's a great way to try to influence the future of the Great Wall, to show how it has changed in the last 100 years," said Lindesay as we walked through the exhibition, which also includes Jesuit maps of the Wall from the 16th century and other early depictions by British soldiers. His work to maintain the Wall has made him a celebrity in China, and he is stopped several times and asked to sign the programme or pose for photographs.

"Rephotographing locations is a kind of advocacy project to make Chinese people, and officials, aware of how the Wall has changed because of nature, because of man's influence or because of neglect," he says.

Establishing the length of the Great Wall is a matter of fierce debate, but Lindesay said it is unknown, as it has never been measured. "More than a Great Wall, it's a collection of different elements – walls, forts, gates and engraved tablets," he says. If all the pieces which make up the structure that is commonly referred to as the Great Wall were added up, the result would be more than 50,000km (31,000 miles) long. The parts bend and weave, incorporating parts of nature, dipping into water, meandering off into other sections, and disappearing only to reappear further off in a remoter part of the country.

It spans nearly 2,000 years of construction, from 300 BC to AD 1644. For many years, the Great Wall was believed to be the only man-made structure visible from space, but China's first astronaut conceded that he couldn't spot it.

"But all parts of the Great Wall have the same function in common. They were built as part of a strategy to defend Chinese land from nomadic invasion," Lindesay said.

The Wall has taken a battering, with only 2,500km left standing today. Ironically, it was never used to withstand an attack – weakness and corruption within the imperial government, rather than the ramparts themselves, led to invaders being able to cross it to reach Beijing. Legend has it that Genghis Khan bribed his way past the guards.

Sections have been knocked down to make way for motorways and housing developments while, over the years, farmers and villagers living in its shadow have plundered its stones for pigsties and henhouses.

Lindesay wanted to learn more about Geil, born in 1865, who had also written about the Yangtze river. He died from influenza in Italy in 1925, but faded from view. However, Lindesay managed to track down one of the American's adoptive grandsons, John Laycock, who had hoarded material about his intrepid ancestor, and later was contacted by Tim Adamsky, an amateur historian in Geil's native Doylestown in Philadelphia, who had recently obtained a trove of Geil material from a local collector's estate, including manuscripts, his compass, his glasses and pocket watch and the Bible which he took everywhere with him.

He ended up with a full picture of the explorer. Both Williams stood out on their travels – Geil was 6ft 4in and attracted a lot of attention on his way through China, especially as foreigners were largely unknown then. Lindesay measures 6ft 2in and in his size-14 boots also attracts stares during his travels.

Lindesay has included stark images of the Wall in the far west of China near Dunhuang, Gansu province, where the Anglo-Hungarian explorer Sir Aurel Stein discovered the Jade Gate, one of the more substantial surviving sections of Wall. Among the photographs taken by this legendary explorer were the granaries that fed garrisons manning remote outposts, and piles of reeds kept ready to be lit if enemy invaders were sighted.

The Great Wall's propaganda value has always been strong, and the legacy is prominent in the show. One picture by Sha Fei, a photojournalist who took many iconic photographs of Communists fighting the Japanese in the 1930s, has some superlative images of troops lined up at Chajianling Ridge with the watchtowers above, facing the invaders. The Japanese later took photographs of their own troops placing flags atop the same watchtowers.

Other images show a French motor enthusiast being carried along the dry banks of a river in the early part of the last century as the tourists began to arrive. The trip to Badaling, traditionally the most accessible part of the Wall from Beijing, used to take a week but it became a day trip when the railway was pushed through.

Today, Badaling is a mass tourist operation, overrun with tour buses and excited visitors. To rephotograph the Wall at Badaling, Lindesay had a difficult job finding a way around the obstacles in place for the needs of modern tourism. Some 10 million people visit the Wall every year, and the government has moved to protect it.

Lindesay believes it has a positive future. "This exhibition shows how China is changing. People know there are fancy new cities in China, but this shows that official thinking is changing. This exhibition wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago because it shows negative images as well as positive," he said.

Some of the photographs show the extent of the challenge facing those trying to preserve the Wall. One, older, picture shows a carved entrance to a watchtower near Tangzigou, a granite keystone depicting a monster's face meant to deter evil spirits. The newer picture shows the same entrance, but the keystone has been stolen. This picture dates from 2005. The older picture is from 2004.

One of the highlights of the show is a large, battered tin box, with the words "North China" inscribed in a flourish on the side in white paint. This contained Geil's diaries, bills for mules and muleteers and other artefacts of the explorer's craft from 100 years ago.

In June this year, a group of 20 people, including family members and friends, joined Lindesay in Doylestown cemetery to commemorate the centenary of William Edgar Geil's journey from one end of the Great Wall to the other. Young William placed a plaque dedicated to Old William.