Farmers donate 30,000 ancient bricks for Great Wall revamping
4/7/2005 17:05
Responding to a call from the local government, farmers of Chadao Village
on Beijing northwestern outskirts, have donated 30,000 ancient bricks for
repairing and restoring the Great Wall at its Chadaocheng section.
The county
government of Yanqing launched a program early this year to protect the Great
Wall and called on villagers living along the Great Wall to donate ancient Great
Wall bricks so as to restore the original look of damaged sections of the Great
Wall at Chadaocheng, northwest of the famous Badaling section of the Great
Wall.
The donated bricks will be used to repair and restore the original look
and style of the west gate tower of Chadaocheng (Chadao Town), said Li Baoli,
head of Chadao village.
Intact ancient Great Wall bricks are 40 cm long, 20
cm wide and about eight cm thick. Nearly one-fourth of the donated ancient
bricks are in good shape, but the others are damaged and deformed, Li
acknowledged.
Chadao has been a town of vital strategic military importance
since it was built in 1551 along the Great Wall, a symbol of China and a popular
UNESCO World Heritage site.
With an eye to developing folk-custom tourism,
Chadao village has started projects to restore the local landscape in the
ancient Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.
Villagers have
actively responded to the projects by turning in the ancient bricks which they
removed from the rampart to build their houses, yards, and even the pigpens in
the 1950s and 1960s, Li, the village head said.
The Great Wall was first
built in the Warring States Period (475-221 BC). It is generally considered to
start at Jiayuguan Pass in northwestern Gansu Province and stretches for 6,000
kilomters to end at Shanhaiguan Pass on the shores of Bohai Bay in the east. The
wall has been rebuilt many times, and many sections of it have suffered serious
erosion from wind and water, as well as human destruction.
Investigations by
the Beijing Municipal Cultural Heritage Bureau show that the total length of the
Beijing section of the Great Wall is 629 kilometers, less than one-fifth of
which is well-preserved and intact. A total of 10 kilometers of the Great Wall
in Beijing has been developed for tourists.
Beijing issued rules and
regulations for protecting the Great Wall in 2003, forbidding climbing sections
of the Great Wall that have not been approved open to visitors and commercial
activities including illegally charging tourists.
Since the early 1980s, the
Chinese government has allocated special funds to restore this magnicient
national monument, directed at such sections as Badaling and Mutianyu in
suburban Beijing, which are open to visitors.
Xinhua
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