Golden Week, a seven-day holiday celebrating China's National Day lived up to its name this week when an estimated 16 million people flocked to the Great Wall of China. Those numbers included 8 million people visiting the wall on Saturday, Oct. 4, the most on one day since 2009 and. That's almost as large as the entire population of New York City. 

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Accessible public sections designed for tourists last week were packed like Nanjing Road in Shanghai with wall-to-wall human traffic.

Kicking off with China National Day on October 1, Golden Week is dedicated to the proposition that Chinese people get away from their everyday lives and travel. Work stops in many places as people celebrate the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

More than 480 million Chinese hit the roads at some point during this year's celebration, according to reports. Always a popular tourist destination, and one of the great wonders of the world, the 13,177-mile wall that is the only man-made object visible from space

Protecting China from hostile neighbors, the Great Wall was started around 500 BC to 517 BC. The great leader Qin Shi Huang linked together various parts of the wall into a continuous barrier about 300 years later.

Less than 10 percent of the wall remains with three-quarters of it in various forms of disrepair, according to the China State Administration of Cultural Heritage. Some areas only have the foundation intact. Many large sections of the wall are dangerous due to disrepair while other, remote sections get no visitors at all.

TagsGreat Wall of China, golden week, World Heritage Sites