Tourists visit the Great Wall of China in Badaling, on the outskirts of
Beijing December 9, 2006. (Claro Cortes IV/Reuters)
BEIJING - Mongol hordes, Japanese soldiers and Red Guards -- China's Great
Wall has seen them all off in its more than 2,000-year history.
Today, tourists, ravers and newly rich Beijingers on weekend jaunts are
pounding parts of the wall to dust.
But a new law which came into effect on December 1, has left one campaigner
hopeful about the wall's future.
"I'm optimistic about this century. The next 30 years are going to be a
period where destruction of the wall is going to be much, much less," said
William Lindesay, founder and director of International Friends of the Great
Wall.
"I've seen more sites being reconstructed in an authentic way, and also I've
discovered hope with local people and also determination amongst local
officials," he told the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Beijing on Friday.
"They've realized that people come to China, and top of the list is the Great
Wall of China," said the British geographer, who has just finished a project
documenting how the wall has changed since the first pictures of it were taken
135 years ago.
The pressures on the wall are enormous.
Lindesay said that some parts now receive more visitors a month than they saw
in the past three centuries combined.
"Finally I think the government's realized that the Great Wall is perceived
by ordinary people as one of the great things of China," he said.
The Great Wall, which snakes its way across more than 6,400 km (4,000 miles),
receives an estimated 10 million visitors a year, many to the 10 km segment open
to tourists at Badaling, the nearest stretch to Beijing.
The wall, which the United Nations listed as a World Heritage Site in 1987,
has been rebuilt many times through the centuries, and many sections of it have
suffered serious damage from weather erosion and human destruction.
Visitors climb wilder, crumblier sections that are not officially open to the
public and some stretches have become popular sites for summer raves.
"The last century couldn't have been much worse," Lindesay said. "Even into
the 1990s I have seen farmers with hoes dismantling towers, putting the bricks
in their baskets to carry downhill to build pig sties and outhouses and
toilets."
Last month, police said three people had used excavators to take earth from
the remains of part of the wall in Inner Mongolia to use as landfill for a
village factory.
The village head protested that it was "just a pile of earth," state media
reported.
The new law means that now people taking earth or bricks from the Great Wall
can be fined up to 500,000 yuan ($63,950).
In another sign that the government was finally taking conservation
seriously, Lindesay said the Badaling stretch -- so touristy it even has a
Starbucks -- would undergo a radical facelift, with all development having to
move 3 km back.
"It's not going to be easy," he said.
"The greatness of the Great Wall is its totality. If the gaps get larger,
it's not such a great wall."
($1=7.819 Yuan)