The Gates to Ancient China

June 7th 2023, I arrived by a night train in Jiayuguan （嘉峪关) - a préfecture-level city in north-western Gansu province, China. It was the first time I was in such a climate - extremely dry, desert-like, with barely any natural vegetation. The city got it's name from the Jiayu Pass - the most intact and largest pass of the Great Wall of China. ⛰️🏔️⛰️ Located at the narrowest point of the Hexi corridor, Jiayuguan Pass used to be the starting point of the ancient Great Wall and the most important military defensive project in far northwest China. The Fortress was also a key waypoint of the ancient Silk Road. 🐫🐪🐫 It was extremely hard to show the enormous scale of the Fortress. The fortress along with the surrounding desert and distant snow-caped mountains, seemed like an impression from an old legend about the beginnings of the Silk Road. ⛰️🐫🧞 China is gigantic, and that's not a discovery. But Gansu allows you, to see a small part of it's very important history. You can see, why this passage was so important for the people travelling to or from ancient China - as a traveller you could chose this narrow pass, or try forcing the rugged mountains. Or the Great Wall. 🗻🛣️🗻 General Feng Sheng, ordered to construct a defensive pass during the early periods of the Ming Dynasty, chose the easy for defence but hard to defeat Jiayu Mountain. The construction started in the year 1372, and completed quickly as the first-stage project which consisted of several ramparts surrounded by some barracks. The subsequent construction took 168 years to complete and finally became the western starting point of the Great Wall of Ming Dynasty. 🧱🚓🧱 #historicallandmarks #naturalbeauty