www.scotsman.com It is the case of China's disappearing Great Wall. A British researcher has found that some sections of the once 4,000-mile long structure are being stolen or vandalised.
William Lindesay, a 50-year-old British geologist-turned-writer, has compared pictures of the wall taken a century ago with the structure as it is today and found that pieces have gone missing.
A report by China's Great Wall Society, a non-governmental organisation working to protect the wall, has found that only about 20% of its former 4,000 miles was in "reasonable shape" while half of its length had actually disappeared completely.
To highlight the problem and encourage protection, Lindesay collected hundreds of photographs of the Great Wall taken in the first half of the 20th century and then journeyed to the same sites to re-photograph them.
He said: "I was walking up to a section of the Great Wall at midnight and looking at towers that had seen the arrival of 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900 and 2000, and I wondered if they would see 2100."
The problem, said Lindesay - whose childhood fascination with the Great Wall grew into infatuation after he ran along roughly 1,600 miles of its length in 1987 - is that many fortifications have been destroyed by vandalism and economic development during the past century.
However, because the Great Wall is actually a series of as many as 20 distinct walls built between 300 BC and the 17th century, it is impossible to say exactly how much of the structures has been lost, Lindesay said.
When the images go on exhibit at Beijing's Capital Museum next month, they will show a structure significantly changed by man for the first time in its history.
In some areas, Lindesay was unable to find sections of wall photographed less than a century ago. In China's central Ningxia province, he spent six days walking along desolate sections of wall and camping in the snow but was unable to locate part of the wall photographed in 1908.
In other places, such as the popular tourist sites of Badaling and Mutianyu outside Beijing, the wall has been developed with amusement-park-style rides that "damage it spiritually", Lindesay said.
At Badaling, where four million tourists visited this past year, the local government has built a zoo and ski slope and allowed businessmen to construct shops and hotels abutting the ancient structure. At the wall's far western edge in Gansu province, where the remains of a tower built in the 14th century are swept by sand from the Gobi Desert, a ride whisks visitors across a canyon on a zip wire.
In the 1950s, Mao Zedong called on the Chinese to "use the past to serve the present" and farmers took stones from the wall to use in homes and animal corrals. After Deng Xiaoping initiated economic reforms in the 1980s, population growth and large-scale projects including roads have led local governments to dismantle sections of wall.
"Especially in the last 10 years, the Great Wall has been in the way of everything - population growth, tourism development, railroad construction and power line placing," Lindesay said.
Last month, workers in Inner Mongolia were detained after they dug up a 2,200-year-old section of the wall and used it as landfill in a local construction project. When officials tasked with protecting cultural relics tried to stop them, a village leader resisted, saying the wall was "just a pile of earth".
China's surge in private car ownership has also put pressure on the wall. The impact of "tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands" of visitors to sections of Wild Wall - remote areas of the wall that had been left alone for hundreds of years - has been devastating, Lindesay said. "One brick at a time, people are taking the Great Wall home."
The destruction is paralleled by the loss of other remnants of China's millennia-old cultural legacy. In Beijing, founded in 1153, most of the traditional neighbourhoods of grey tile homes surrounding the Forbidden City have been cleared for steel-and-glass towers similar to city centres in any major western metropolis.
A flourishing market for Chinese antiquities has also led to rampant grave robbery.
The slow destruction of the Great Wall has saddened Lindesay, partly because in its loss he senses that "worldwide, people are becoming detached from their past".
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