Great wall has lost a third of its extent

[Thanas]

Guardian

Around 30% of China’s Ming-era Great Wall has disappeared over time as adverse natural conditions and reckless human activities – including stealing bricks to build houses – erode the Unesco world heritage site, state media has reported.

The Great Wall is not a single unbroken structure but stretches for thousands of miles in sections, from Shanhaiguan on the east coast to Jiayuguan in the windswept sands on the edge of the Gobi desert to the west.

It is so dilapidated in places that estimates of its total length vary from 9,000 to 21,000 kilometres, depending on whether missing sections are included. Despite its length, it is not, as is sometimes claimed, visible from space.

Construction first began in the 3rd century BC, but nearly 6,300km were built in the Ming dynasty of 1368-1644, including the much-visited sections north of Beijing.

Of that, 1,962km has melted away over the centuries, the Beijing Times reported. Some of the construction has weathered away, while plants growing in the walls have accelerated the decay, said the report, citing a survey last year by the Great Wall of China Society.

“Even though some of the walls are built of bricks and stones, they cannot withstand the perennial exposure to wind and rain,” the paper quoted Dong Yaohui, a vice-president of the society, as saying.

“Many towers are becoming increasingly shaky and may collapse in a single rain storm in summer.”

Tourism and local residents’ activities are also damaging the longest human construction in the world, the paper added. Poor villagers in Lulong county, in the northern province of Hebei, used to knock thick grey bricks from a section of wall in their village to build homes, and slabs engraved with Chinese characters were sold for 30 yuan (£3) each by locals , it said.

Under Chinese regulations, people who take bricks from the Great Wall can be fined up to ¥5,000, according to the state-run Global Times.

“But there is no specific organisation to enforce the rules,” said Jia Hailin, a cultural relics protection official in Hebei. “Damage could only be reported to higher authorities and it is hard to solve when it happened on the border of two provinces.”

Explorations of undeveloped parts of the Great Wall – an increasingly popular leisure activity in recent years – had brought those sections more tourists than they could bear, damaging them severely, the Times report added.

[Zor]

The solution is simple: hire people to maintain it and repair the damaged sections of it.

Zor

[Thanas]

The solution is simple: hire people to maintain it and repair the damaged sections of it.

Zor

One does not simply repair a ancient wall.

[ray245]

They are already doing so using ancient techniques.

[Thanas]

They are already doing so using ancient techniques.

Let us hope they do better than the "ancient" techniques they used in the past to "repair" buddhist temples. I really hope they take better care of the wall.

[ray245]

They are already doing so using ancient techniques.

Let us hope they do better than the "ancient" techniques they used in the past to "repair" buddhist temples. I really hope they take better care of the wall.

I think they employed some local villagers in the more remote part of the Great wall to use manual construction to rebuild section of the wall, usually from the Han or Qin era. The problem is the Great wall is such a huge structure, and the earlier parts of the Great Wall aren't well preserved enough to attract tourist there. As a result, the parts that needs the most amount of help simply did not get enough attention from anyone.

[Borgholio]

They are already doing so using ancient techniques.

Aren't they doing something similar with the Giza pyramids? Using period techniques and materials to try to at least slow the rate of decay?

[Ziggy Stardust]

Let us hope they do better than the "ancient" techniques they used in the past to "repair" buddhist temples. I really hope they take better care of the wall.

I think they employed some local villagers in the more remote part of the Great wall to use manual construction to rebuild section of the wall, usually from the Han or Qin era. The problem is the Great wall is such a huge structure, and the earlier parts of the Great Wall aren't well preserved enough to attract tourist there. As a result, the parts that needs the most amount of help simply did not get enough attention from anyone.

When I was driving across China, I went to a section of the Great Wall by the Tongguan Pass. It is one of the oldest sections of the Wall, built during the Warring States period. On this map, it is the section running almost north-south by the Yellow River and the city of Chang'an, sort of bottom center of the map. In that part of the country (i.e. far away from the major tourist revenue sites closer to Beijing), there has been almost no effort to restore the Wall at all. In fact, in many cases it was almost impossible to tell the Wall was even there without looking very, very carefully; it follows the top of a ridgeline and is so crumbled and overgrown with vegetation that it blends into the surrounding trees.

At one place, the Chinese government is "rebuilding" one of the gatehouses overlooking the Tongguan Pass (which has great historical significance in Chinese dynastic history). I visited the site (which, as of two years ago, was still under construction), but it was clear that they weren't making any effort at actually preserving anything or using traditional techniques. Not only was it all cranes and heavy construction equipment, but the edifices were clearly made out of modern material (and, in fact, to my untrained eye, didn't even look like they were using an architectural style from the correct period of Chinese history). Not only that, but down the hill was a gigantic rubbish heap where they were tossing all of the bricks from the original Wall itself. They just tossed it down a hill and built a new structure on top for the tourists.

So, bottom line, I don't particularly trust them to do the right thing in other parts of the country. Maybe I'm wrong. In the meantime, since they obviously made no effort to care, I took one of the bricks they tossed a way, so I now have a 2000 year old piece of the Great Wall on my dresser.

[Irbis]

Aren't they doing something similar with the Giza pyramids? Using period techniques and materials to try to at least slow the rate of decay?

You mean the outside? Because I have been to pyramids and I can tell you the only activity on their slopes is a few bored guards (ineffectively) trying to stop tourists from walking on the first few levels. Not very effectively, I might add. Moreover, the part where piramids stand in the middle of empty desert in movies and pictures is a lie - they are now almost entirely surrounded by the city, and local traffic is worsening the matter. If Giza wasn't so big moneymaker, I suspect they would be dynamited and part of someone's house by now.