We’ve all been to the Great Wall. If you haven’t – and you’re reading this in Beijing right now – what are you doing? Get up there before it disappears.
We kid not. An article in the Beijing Times made headlines around the world last month when it announced that roughly 30 percent of the manmade Ming dynasty-era Great Wall had disappeared.
This wasn’t the first time journalists had written about the Great Wall’s deterioration, but the scale – and the accompanying hard statistics – caused international consternation, with the news being reported in publications such as the New York Times and the Guardian.
According to the report, 22 percent of the original Ming dynasty wall is simply gone. (While sections of the wall pre-date the Ming, it was the Ming who created the wall in the iconic style we think of today – the wide pathways and tall watchtowers of Mutianyu and Badaling.)
But how does a wall – a great wall – disappear?
According to the Beijing Times, China's national treasure is now being threatened by those closest to it. People from remote villages near the Wall have taken to stealing its ancient bricks, sometimes simply for construction material, but most often to sell on the black market. What should be an invaluable cultural treasure can be picked up for as little as RMB40 a block.
Elsewhere, the Wall's deterioration is a matter of erosion. And elsewhere still, Ming dynasty-era bricks have been replaced with cheap concrete in misguided attempts to ‘restore’ the Wall and market it to tourists. Some scholars including these faulty restorations in their calculations of how much of the Wall has disappeared.
Search online or crack open a Lonely Planet, and you'll find advice on where and how to hike the ‘Wild Wall,’ the unprotected sections that are most vulnerable to destruction. But these sections’ wildness is both their charm and fatal flaw. Tourists, too, can cause damage to the ancient structure.
“Our historian always tries to advocate doing something good if you're on the Wild Wall,” says Sarah Keenlyside of travel group Bespoke Beijing. “Picking up litter for example, and by that we don't just mean your own.”
Some scholars take issue with the report, unsure of what unscientific methods led Beijing Times to declare that a fifth of the Wall is gone.
But no scholars disagree with the fact that great (Great?) swaths of the Wall are, indeed, disappearing.
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