- Nov 5, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: May 15
The Great Wall of China has always occupied the collective imagination. Historically symbolized as a dragon across the Chinese landscape, with its head in the East and tail stretching West, it has been a subject that fascinates and beguiles, trailed by myths and misconceptions. (No, you cannot see the Great Wall of China with the naked eye from space.)
Spanning thousands of miles in length and constructed over hundreds of years of a storied history, the Great Wall remains a cultural icon that has withstood the force of China's changing history. Indeed, in recent years, the word that surrounds talk about China is “change.” Largely thanks to market reforms in 1978, the last 40 years has been a time of rapid, unprecedented growth for China with resounding changes across its policy, economy, and culture.
Only a few years earlier, Michael Yamashita, a third-generation Japanese American from New Jersey, graduated from Wesleyan College in 1971. Hoping to search out his roots, he immediately departed on a trip to Japan after graduation, that eventually stretched to four years across Asia: traveling, exploring, and photographing.
“I became a photographer because I was snapping pictures and sending them back home to family and friends, to show people what I was doing,” Yamashita said, recalling his beginnings as an amateur photographer. Quickly becoming enthralled by photography and travel, his early projects took him across Japan and Singapore, before he joined the National Geographic Magazine in 1979, which took him on his first trip to China in 1982: and his first stop, the Great Wall of China.
“Nobody really knew China in ‘82,” Yamashita recalled. “I remember thinking, 'This is such fertile ground for stories. This is all going to be gone soon.” As an early witness to the metamorphosing face of China, Yamashita’s photographs documented the ephemerality of daily life in the country. His projects often traced journeys and paths deeply engraved in legends and history: for example, the Silk Road, the Mekong River, and Marco Polo's travels from Italy to China. These journeys captured not only the picturesque landscapes of these ancient paths, but also the lives that surrounded these lands: their history, present, and fast-changing future.
"I have always been interested in the most remote sections—the edges—of China...the rural, peasant China," Yamashita said, as it was where traditions often survived the longest. Looking back now, he notes that his photos are of a China that largely, no longer exists.
(Re)-Encountering the Great Wall
"Every one of my stories over the years—some aspect of it has touched the Great Wall," Yamashita said. Encountering the Great Wall, his latest book released in July 2025, revisits photographs mostly taken from the late 1990s to early 2000s, as well as from his initial trip to China in 1982. Released in commemoration of the People's Republic of China's 75th anniversary, his newest project preserves images of a time largely before China’s tourism boom. On a trip to Beijing last year to celebrate the occasion, Yamashita returned to the Great Wall and the sites of some of his most famous photos.
“It has turned into a tourist Disneyland,” Yamashita said, speaking of the Great Wall he had once known. “Simitai, which used to be part of the ‘Wild Wall’—they had built a whole water town, so exact in detail, that if you didn’t know what the real thing looked like, you’d think this is it.” When Yamashita had initially travelled to Simitai in 2003, it was feared as an incredibly dangerous section of the Wall.
“You could easily kill yourself,” he said. In fact, he recalled that his fellow Great Wall journalists and explorers, Peter Hessler and William Lindesay, had both fallen and seriously injured themselves traversing the Wild Wall. Home to the steepest sections of the Wall, including the 80-degree slope of the “Heavenly Ladder,” which Yamashita had previously climbed in order to photograph a view of Beijing, the life-and-death Wild Wall that he had tamed no longer existed—instead, it had been transformed into a “tourist madhouse.”
Like many of Yamashita’s projects, Encountering the Great Wall explores the thousands of miles of a structure deeply entrenched in China's culture and history, as well as the many lives that teem under the shadow of the wall. In many photos, Yamashita purposefully poses the wall to be hidden in the background, evoking his own experience tracking its path across the country.
“That was a big surprise: you’d be following a map and it’d disappear, and then suddenly—boom, there it is! It would make my day,” he recalled.
In some moments, the Wall might be a few stones in the background; in others, it's presence fundamentally altered the livelihoods of those that surrounded it. At the Luan River in Hebei, the structure of the Great Wall had originally served as part of the dam that created the Panjiakou Reservoir. Subsequently, parts of the Wall, as well as the farmland that surrounded it, sank underwater.
“It buried their livelihood,” Yamashita said, speaking of the local farmers of Panjiakou. “But they were able to adapt, to be fishermen.” In fact, the submerged sections of the Wall turned out to be a fertile habitat for fish, acting as an artificial reef. Eventually, the locals of Panjiakou were able to make an even better living as fishermen than they had as farmers.
Over 300 miles away in a village in Shanxi province, shepherds had found another use of the Great Wall. They used this ancient structure as the back wall of their sheep pens, and carved out the stone where needed to create a gate for their flock.
Creating In the Age of Change
In the 40 years since Michael Yamashita first captured the Great Wall, much has changed in China—and much has changed for him, too. Beyond his days as a fresh college graduate and amateur photographer in Japan, Yamashita has cemented his legacy as a legendary storyteller, photographer, explorer, and "Far East Expert." During his time at the National Geographic, perhaps his most well known, he made history there as one of the first contributing photographers of Asian descent.
“My brand has been ‘East meets West,’” Yamashita said. “I have been doing these stories [about Asia], mainly for a Western audience. I have seen my career as an ambassador for both sides.”
In recent years, Yamashita has grown his Instagram to 2 million followers, and has been lauded as one of photography's top influencers. In addition, he has made frequent appearances as a speaker and educator, and had early success adopting his photography to the NFT market. In effect, he appears to have seamlessly transitioned his content into this new age.
However, Yamashita has also personally seen the challenges presented by modern technologies. Social media algorithms that favor short videos kill engagement on his posts that mainly display still photos; AI tools train themselves from his own photos to generate inauthentic images as opportunities for photographers wither away.
Like many forms of media and art, photography has been at the mercy of a rapidly transforming ecosystem of technology, Internet, AI, and more. Yamashita insists that there will still always be a need for storytellers, photographers included, in this new world. He recalled the time when he started as a photographer, when everybody said: "Nah, print’s dead. No more LIFE Magazine, no Look…Don’t start. It’s too hard, it’s too difficult.” In fact, National Geographic was one of the only major photography magazine publishers left.
Many new technologies have created colossal improvements in the accessibility of photography. With the Internet functioning as a virtually infinite outlet, Yamashita believes that there has never been a better time to show off your work and have it reach a global audience. With the capability of the smartphones of today, everyone already has an incredibly powerful camera in their pockets.
“There’s always a need for that photograph. Somebody is going to need a real photograph. Whatever the new medium is going to be, I believe there is always going to be room for talent,” Yamashita affirmed.
Nearly 50 years has passed since Yamashita first began his career as a photographer, and though he has cemented his legacy as one of the most influential photographers of our time, he maintains that his work is yet to be done. With new projects upcoming, including a trip to Tibet this December, Yamashita hopes to continue documenting the changing landscapes of culture and country across Asia.
Though many of his images depict a history that has long disappeared, Yamashita’s photographs will live on. In partnership with the Reignwood Foundation, over half a million of Yamashita's photographs (one of the largest individual collections of photographs in China), are being digitally archived. Eventually, they hope the archive can serve as the basis for a museum to document the 40 years (and counting) of China’s most explosive growth period.
“My goal is to keep these photographs alive,” Yamashita said. From capturing the sweeping beauty of the natural landscapes of Asia, to the traditions and peculiarities of the people living in them, Yamashita’s photographs breathed life into untold stories—many of which were lost to time marching forward.
But Yamashita doesn't fear that unyielding wave of the future: “Everything has changed. But the story hasn’t changed.”
All images © Michael Yamashita
