JINSHANLING, CHINA — David Spindler stands along a crenellated crown of the Great Wall and gestures toward a river valley that snakes away northward into the gloom.
"Over there," he says, his voice lilting in a sense of discovery. "That's the direction from which the Mongols attacked."
For two hours on Oct. 23, 1554, a bloody battle raged. The raiders used ropes to reach the Chinese defenders, climbing the wall "like ants," Spindler explains. He talks of a Chinese soldier who hacked off the hand of an attacker only to be killed moments later, his head pierced by an enemy arrow.
Spindler has done his homework, much of it in the National Library of China, where he has pored over government reports and military archives detailing the clash along this isolated mountain ridge 75 miles northwest of Beijing, deciphering the ancient Chinese characters that hold clues to a past 454 years old.
The lanky, 6-foot-7, 41-year-old American is an unlikely, almost accidental scholar of one of China's most beloved icons, a Harvard Law School graduate who left his job as a consultant and lived off savings to pursue his grand obsession thousands of miles from his Massachusetts roots. Some day soon, he hopes to publish a book on all he's learned.
Without academic affiliation or funding, Spindler has spent 14 years traveling across China and even to Japan to review arcane centuries-old texts for firsthand accounts and details. And he has spent more than 830 days clambering over the wall's far-flung ramparts around Beijing -- enough to wear through several pairs of hiking boots.
On hikes over steep, difficult terrain, he has bushwhacked, with his body scratched and bleeding, through thickets to reach new sites. Often, Spindler approaches the wall along ridges, much as the raiders did centuries ago -- excursions he calls "hiking like a Mongol."
Dressed in a wide-brimmed Tilley hat, red-checked hunting jacket and arm-length work gloves, he has endured the humid 100-degree days of summer and shortened snow-blown days of December.
"I've spent 5% of my life there," he says of the wall.
Spindler's relationship with the Great Wall was not love at first sight. He initially visited there as a tourist in 1987 while on a summer study program in China.
Years later, after moving to Beijing to study pre-modern Chinese history, he still saw the wall less as its own destination than as a respite from the stress of a teeming foreign capital with 17 million residents.
