Max Pearson
speaker
1,342 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 11 Apr
Max Pearson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Yao Huidong and his team took photographs and copious notes of what they saw on their travels, building up a comprehensive record of the wall mile after mile.
Basically, as they built the Great Wall, they used the natural terrain to their advantage whenever they could.
So they built fortifications where it was easy to defend and hard to attack.
They also used the material that was at hand.
So where stones are easy to come by, they use them like bricks.
Elsewhere in granite areas, they use the big boulders.
And on the plains, for example, they just use the compacted earth.
In strategically important areas, there will be more than one wall, sometimes two or three deep, a few kilometers apart, so that if the first wall fell, there were reinforcements behind it.
Communications in rural China in the 80s were minimal.
The team relied on letters and parcels sent from home, but it was a wrench to be so far from their families.
Oh, I was extremely homesick.
And at the time, my mom was already quite elderly and in poor health.
My wife was looking after her and our daughter all by herself.
When I left, my daughter was only one year old.
I'd sometimes cuddle the children of the villagers we stayed with, and that made me so sad.
It was really difficult for me.
When the authorities had learned of Yao Huidong's expedition, they'd encouraged him, but the team didn't know that while they'd been trekking across the wall, they'd become national heroes, with regular write-ups in the newspapers on their progress and on the ancient history of the wall.
Their newfound fame came as something of a shock to them when they finally reached Jiayu Pass in the west.
508 days after they'd started.
When we finished the expedition, we were mobbed by the press.
Showing 361–380 of 1,342 · page 19 of 68
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