Instead of visiting the Great Wall the old fashioned way, you can find at the foot of the Great Wall, about an hour from Beijing, an entire village supported by sustainable tourism.

"This one Chinese guy was selling T-shirts and I bought him a house." In the mid-90, Jim Spear went to Mutianyu, 70 kilometers north-east of Beijing. He was vice-president of a US medical equipment company at the time. This Californian noticed an abandoned village at the foot of the Great Wall in the middle of a centenarian pine forest. A building caught his gaze and he decided to make it his house and renovate it.

This was the first step to a long adventure. He then created China Bound with his wife and a couple of friends. The consulting firm specializes in the hospital and pharmaceutical sectors and rapidly becomes a major private investor in Beijing ABC, its Chinese subsidiary. Their explicit goal is to develop sustainable tourism.

Since its September 2006 opening, The Schoolhouse, which also houses the Beijing ABC offices, is fulfilling this mission diligently. You can find round tables on a long rectangular terrace, hills sloping down, a courtyard, a red flag floating in the wind, some conifers, but above all, stones, bricks and people who tell stories.

Like that of the old school, closed in 1995, whose large blackboards, grey cement walls and classrooms were saved to open a restaurant in Western cuisine (The Canteen), a glass blowing workshop, a small shop and an art gallery. Adding to the terrace punctuated by colored glass pieces with a view over the Great Wall worthy of any deposed emperor.

Respect for their identity

The Schoolhouse is also the story of these poor villagers like 92 year old Zhang Enrong, one of the last Chinese with bended feet, or Li Lianting, the current mayor for whom rice was seen as a luxury in his family. Despite their precarious situation, they would have left this peaceful mountainside for nothing in the world, and they have reason for doing so. Already, several hundred people are awarded a job after being locally recruited and trained to work either in restaurants, service or construction, all the while keeping respect for their identities and their environment.

"Tourism generates income for the village of Mutianyu but does not make it alive. The surroundings are still poor," says MacLean Brodie, the Beijing ABC project manager. "Our goal is to keep the locals by involving them but all the while being mindful of the landscape," said the 27 year old Canadian. It is in that spirit that six homes have been restored and converted into guest houses. Each of them belongs to wealthy foreigners who travel often just like Jim Spear and who fell in love the beauty of the area.

The original architecture was preserved in all its generous simplicity: from the stones and bricks which come from the Great Wall itself, to the heavy wooden beams, chimneys, and even kang (large typical rural Chinese bricks beds and heated from below the coal: ndlr). And if they are equipped with all modern comforts, these secondary residences have no other claim than to mirror and accompany the authenticity of the neighborhood.

Text: Aurélie Palancher
Photos: Wang Zhuo
May 2008