(Clearwisdom.net) At noon on December 17, 1999, seventy-three Dafa disciples from fifteen provinces in China started to practice Falun Gong in an orderly formation on the two peaks of the famous Great Wall at Badaling on the outskirts of Beijing. Four Falun Dafa banners were hung on the two peaks. The largest banner was five-meters-long and three-meters-wide. These banners were sacred and marvelous. The exercise music and the practice formulas were so clear and reverberated in the air. All of the practitioners looked benevolent and composed, and this magnificent feat moved the heavens. The weather became extremely pleasant afterwards; there were only a few white clouds moving in the clear blue sky. It made the Great Wall after a snowfall appear even more magnificent. A lot of tourists stopped to watch their practice and nobody went to report them. The practice lasted for almost two hours.
All 73 of these practitioners volunteered to go to the Great Wall to practice after their appeal in Beijing around mid-December was turned down. Because of their appeal, they were badly treated, arrested and even beaten. After the appeal, they decided to practice the exercises together on the Great Wall. They hoped to tell the people via the group practice that Falun Dafa is beneficial to the people and the country, and that their Teacher is pure and righteous and Dafa practitioners are innocent.
Their daring feat shocked the evil. Around 2 p.m. on December 17, 1999, dozens of police officers came up the peaks by cable cars. When they arrived, they found practitioners simply reciting Teacher's articles calmly. They remained unruffled even though some of the policemen began to beat their faces and kick their legs. The vicious police photographed the practicing Dafa disciples and illegally searched the tourists who witnessed this brutal treatment of Dafa Disciples, taking away their cameras and personal identification. At 3 p.m. the police sent the practitioners down the peaks row by row. Two practitioners were escorted by one police person in a cable car, and the two female practitioners in the first row were handcuffed together. The police took two busloads full of practitioners to the detention center of Yanqing County, where they were ordered to stand in the yard to wait for each one to be illegally interrogated. While there, the police officers even denied them the use of the restroom. They were forced to remain standing in the yard until after they were body searched at 1'clock the next morning and put into cells.
The cells were gloomy and cold. Beside the board used for sleeping there was an empty water container and a latrine without water to flush. When the practitioners started to practice in the cell, a 50-year-old policeman swore at them and threatened to use an electric baton on them if they didn't stop. After 4 a.m., 12 practitioners--eight on the board and four on the ground--practiced the first set of Falun Gong exercises. The policeman returned with a younger officer. He shouted curses in the cell and put the high voltage electric baton on the head of a practitioner (an elderly woman) who was standing near the door. The old lady continued to hold her hands still and didn't budge an inch as she was being shocked. The policeman was puzzled and tried the electric baton again. Blue electrical sparks shot out. The baton hissed on the temples of the old lady, but she was still motionless while the high voltage baton was on her head. The officer re-checked the electric baton and continued his test on the Dafa practitioner. He tried on one temple after another and also tested the baton on her neck, but it didn't have any effect. He then tried it on a young practitioner from Liaoning and the two others from Jiangsu and Guangdong respectively. To his surprise, there was no effect on these four people. He stopped swearing and looked at the baton in puzzlement. The young policeman following him was perplexed too. The practitioners gathered around them to tell them the truth of Dafa and persuaded them not to abuse the practitioners any more. In silence he turned away and left. When he passed by the neighboring cell where the practitioners were also practicing, he just shouted, "Stop the practice!" twice and walked away.
From December 18 on, the officials from the Beijing Public Security Bureau kept interrogating them, trying to find out the so-called organizers of the event. Day in and day out, the practitioners were held in the interrogation rooms with handcuffs on their wrists. The male practitioners were imprisoned together with criminals and were beaten by the criminals and policemen. Nevertheless, none of them yielded. "We have no organizer and we did it out of our own will," said the practitioners. They demonstrated unyielding determination in Dafa. Later, all of them were sent to detention in their home cities or sent to labor camps, where they were cruelly persecuted. Some of them have most likely been beaten or tortured to death. However, the light of the truth they emanated in practicing Falun Gong exercises together on Badaling Great Wall frightened the evil, and the mighty virtue they established will be recorded in the history of the cosmos forever.
