Hello you're listening to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week from 1978 the death of Pope John Paul

the first after just a month in the job.

I'd say he was a real priest of the people, very much like Pope Francis is today.

He understood ordinary folk and he'd always teach us to focus on the poor.

Also Britain's land girls in the Second World War, the anti-apartheid activist Steve Bico and turning against a colonial power how Guinea gained independence

from France.

Suddenly people realized that the French deed colonizers.

The French did conquer the country. The French did defeat our grandparents.

That's all coming up later. But we begin with an epic journey along the Great Wall of China,

a construction of truly epic proportions.

This happened in China during the early 1980s, a time when tourism was in its infancy and public

knowledge about China's rich cultural heritage was often lacking. The Great Wall snakes across the northern

mountainous states, and Rebecca Kessby has been speaking to Yao Huidong, who was one of three young Chinese men who, as far as anyone knows, were the first people

to walk along the whole of the wall. Sometimes when I stand on the wall I feel like I'm having a conversation with people from ancient times.

When I put my hand on the stones, I think about how hundreds of years ago this stone was carved out of the mountains

and placed on the wall by someone. And I try to imagine them and what sort of lives they had.

Yao Hoi Dong has spent his life studying the war,

and on September the 24th, 1985,

he and two friends became the first people ever recorded to walk the entire length of it,

well over 8,000 kilometers.

It was an adventure that took them 16 months,

...