According to NASA, unless you use radar imagery, the Great Wall of China is not visible from space.
But if you get up close and personal with the wall, as a group of students in the Duchess Park secondary school band did last week when they played there, it is a sight to behold.
A Prince George contingent - 39 students, two Duchess Park graduates, 25 parents, four chaperones and band director Stefania Dubrowski - made music on the wall while on a tour of China during spring break, a trip that ended Wednesday.
It was a cold damp morning when the band played its 25-minute wall gig and the breaks between songs were kept to a minimum, just to keep the fingers and lips of the young musicians from going numb.
"It was really amazing watching the band get closer together just from that one performance," said Dubrowski. "We got a pretty big crowd right away, and a whole bunch of people who were hiking up the wall heard the music hiked back down to come and watch, and by the middle of the performance we were surrounded by tourists, locals and the parents.
"It was exciting, but it was uncomfortably cold. The flute players at one point were trying to cover their hands with their sleeves. We were not expecting to feel that cold, but it was part of the adventure."
Build in the seventh century, the wall averages about five metres wide and 7.8 metres high, but it's the length - 21,196 kilometres - which makes it one of the world's most impressive structures. After their performance, the students took time to walk a steep and precarious rock pathway along the wall to reach its highest point.
The band performed a couple days later at a Beijing school auditorium and their performance that day was magic to their conductor's ears.
"The kids really pulled it together, better than I've ever heard them play these songs," said Dubrowski. "It's amazing how all the experiences on the tour affected them - they're so much more mature now. It's a wide diversity of Grades 7 to 12 and it's not like they were all friends before the trip, but watching them all bond through their experiences and grow together, they all seem close now.
"Some of these kids, the furthest they'd traveled before was Vancouver, and it was so fun to watch their faces, with everything new to them."
The 10-night, eight-day tour in northern China included jade/silk/tea factory tours, a visit to Tiananmen Square, a tai chi lesson at the Temple of Heaven, an acrobatics show, and a walk in the Wangfujing market in Beijing, where students sampled snake, scorpion and a selection of smoked insects. The students spent five days in Beijing and three days in Xi'an.
"We had two students who understand Mandarin and one who speaks it quite well, but the tour guides from [SNA Tours of Vancouver] were amazing," said Dubrowski. "They were teaching the students about history, language and culture. Every day they would teach them the Chinese characters, how to read them and write them."
