INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, TUESDAY FEBRUARY 5, 2002
Saving China’s Great Wall From Itself By Sheila Melvin Beijing – “If you haven’t been to the Great Wall, you aren’t a real man,” Mao Zedong once said. Most of the chairman’s pithy pronouncements are now taken seriously only by historians. But this particular assertion is known to almost every citizen of the People’s Republic, millions of whom journey to the Great Wall each year.

Indeed, so many real men, and women, are visiting the wall that the most popular sites outside Beijing are besieged by hordes of tourists in baseball caps and overrun with souvenir sellers. At Badaling, the most-visited section, there are hundreds of noodle shops and kitsch vendors, a movie theater, two chairlifts, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, an imitation KFC and even an imitation Great Wall emblazoned with a replica of Mao’s quote in his own calligraphy.

This excessive development is disillusioning to many who visit, but for William Lindesay, a Briton who has devoted much of his adult life to exploring and studying the Great Wall, it is tantamount to sacrilege. “For me, the Great Wall is the wonder of the world. Just the Ming Dynasty Wall dwarfs the Three Gorges” dam project, Lindesay says. “It has bricks that weigh 26 pounds, stones that took eight men to carry – the amount of labor invested in it makes it almost sacred.”

The wall, Lindesay says, is a defense made of various materials—stone, rammed earth, brick—that was built on imperial order to protect the empire from invasion. The Chinese have a long history of building walls, dating from the Warring States period, and there have been perhaps 20 walls in the nation’s history. But in Chinese terminology, the Great Wall is regarded as one continuous defense project.

The wall constructed by the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) is the longest of all the walls, 6,500 kilometers (4,150 miles). It also is the most sophisticated, built when China was the most technologically advanced nation on earth, and the only wall held together with mortar. Though it was a superb defense, it was intended to ward off nomadic enemies who were difficult to engage and essentially impossible to defeat, and its performance depended on the loyalty and competence of the people running it. Ultimately, the Ming Dynasty was overthrown by some of those very “barbarians” it had built the wall to defend against. Since these people—who founded the Qing Dynasy (1644-1911)—were themselves nomads, they did not see a need to continue with wall building; instead, they devoted their resources to erecting coastal installations to defend against the Europeans who were arriving by sea.

Nonetheless, the Qings did institute a law stating that efforts should be made to preserve the wall and banning the removal of bricks from it. But the impact of time, war and the depredations of people in search of building materials has left the wall greatly damaged in its most accessible areas.

Lindesay’s passion for the wall dates from 1986, when he made the first of several attempts to run its length, by himself, with no support team. Dysentery, dehydration and bone fractures thwarted him, but in 1987 he successfully ran 2,500 kilometers of the Great Wall, despite being caught in an area closed to foreigners and deported to Hong Kong in mid-trip. That adventure, recorded in his book “Alone on the Great Wall,” made Lindesay intimately familiar with the wall and its geography. It also gave him a vocation – the preservation of wild areas around the wall and its surrounding “wallscape” in the Beijing vicinity.

“About three years ago I first made very simple efforts to draw attention to the fact that the Great Wall was being damaged,” he says. “The Ming Dynasty Wall alone is the world’s most extensive relic, But it’s outside without one manager. There are a few sites, but the rest is wild wall, wilderness wall. This is O.K. if people use it responsibly—but they don’t.

The desecration of the wall in the Beijing area—which includes the most stunning and best-preserved sections—is worsening quickly. Despite a regulation that prohibits the construction of anything on the wall or within 200 meters on either side, sections are now covered with cable cars and tobaggon runs and lined with souvenir shanties and parking lots. Less developed areas and also being tarnished by the construction of radio aerials, electricity pylons, peasant villages built of white bathroom tiles and fancy weekend homes for the nouveau riche.

Lindesay’s initial effort, a clean-up at one section of wild wall outside the capital, received considerable attention from a number of Beijing newspapers, including the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily. That reception reassured Lindesay that his efforts to help preserve the wall would be welcomed, rather than criticized as interference from foreigners. It also motivated him to use garbage collecting as a platform for addressing larger problems. “In the course of directing this small wall conservation program,” he says, “I’ve realized that we are moving too slowly; the issues are too complex and we need more financing to handle them in a timely and efficient way.”

So, to attract financing and other support, Lindesay worked with the Cultural Relics Bureau here to apply to have the Beijing area wall included in the World Monuments Fund 2002 list of the “World’s 100 Most Endangered Sites.” The application was accepted and Lindesay will now apply to the fund for a $50,000 grant, which he hopes to use to clean up Huanghuacheng, an area of the wall that was still wild only five or six years ago but has since fallen victim to tourism and illegal construction.

He also founded International Friends of the Great Wall, a group in Hong Kong that he hopes will become a force in the battle to protect the wild areas of the wall near Beijing from further damage.

International Friends will cooperate with Beijing’s cultural relic authorities to influence the debate over preservation, one that often comes down to the competition with tourism.

“What does protect the Great Wall mean?” Lindesay says. “Most Chinese authorities see this as cement it up, make it stable and bring in the infrastructure required by modern tourism. Tourism is an important part of the economy and it will become more so. But, the Great Wall is a record of history, of the conflicts between nomads and sedentary peoples. It’s a part of China’s geography—it’s marked on maps around the world. ‘Great’ is not an overstatement, it’s an understatement.

Lindesay hopes that International Friends will be able to assist in the creation of a coherent, integrated plan for protecting the wall. “We need a cultural-her-itage management plan for the wall and associated cultural relics. The wall is a military system –there are brick kilns, quarries, barracks, roads. There all need protection.”

Equally in need of preservation is the wall’s surrounding landscape. “A major purpose for International Friends,” Lindesay continues, “is so 20 years from now it will still be possible to go north of Beijing and at least view a wallscape. Right now this doesn’t seem likely. There is too much development and the view will be obstructed.”

To be sure, Lindesay acknowledges the difficulties that central and local authorities face in their efforts to preserve the Great Wall. “We’re here in a country with 5,000 years of recorded history and many more years of pre-history,” he says. “Every year there are 400 major archaeological discoveries, many accidental. Not to mention cultural relics smuggling; the authorities have their hands full.”

Indeed, even Lindesay has to balance competing interests when it comes to his efforts to study, explore and preserve the Wall. After writing an entire book about the wilderness wall in the Beijing area, he has decided not to publish it because he fears it would prove too useful to developers.

“It’s a dilemma. You want to help likeminded people but you can’t control who reads the book.”

Sheila Melvin, a free-lance writer, divides her time between China and the United States.

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST THURSDAY JUNE 20, 2002 Geologist aims to protect ‘wild Wall’ from ravages of progress By Leigh Jenkins A British geologist who had the Great Wall added to the World Monuments Fund’s list of the 100 most endangered sites last year is hoping his new organisation can put a stop to the construction, vandalism and rubbish desecrating the largest cultural artefact on the planet. The International Friends of the Great Wall, founded by William Lindesay with the support of the Beijing Administrative Bureau for Cultural Relics and Unesco, will focus on maintaining Beijing’s undeveloped “wild Wall”, spurring public education initiatives and strengthening legal protections.

Although about 15km of Beijing municipality’s Great Wall has been developed for tourism and receives varying levels of government protection, the vast majority of its 673km within the municipality has been exposed to the effects of litter, graffiti and neighbouring construction projects.

“While the whole wall is theoretically managed by government bureaus, the unique and phenomenal expanse of the wall makes it uniquely impossible to protect,” Mr Lindesay said.

He sees the “wild Wall” as an open-air museum without a curator, and wants a 200-metre buffer zone around it so the wall and the natural backdrop can be enjoyed in a pristine setting.

“There are three options: let the free-for-all continue, let he local government build fences around it and turn it all into a tourist site, or have an organisation such as ours use stewardship to set up green-message notice boards and organise local farmers to work as rangers,” Mr Lindesay said.

He says areas such as Huanghuacheng illustrate the endemic results of neglect, where the natural landscape has been altered by rubbish, graffiti, signs and restaurants. Villagers have taken over certain watchtowers, extorting money under threat of violence before permitting passage.

“Major developments in close proximity to the wall threaten to scar the natural landscape, given oversights in state land administration practices that make it possible and inexpensive for developers to lease land-use rights beside the Great Wall,” Mr Lindesay said.

If left unchecked, he predicts the Great Wall’s destruction will only be exacerbated over time, given the increasing numbers of personal car owners visiting the wall and dumping their rubbish, and estimates that China will become the world’s top tourist destination by 2020.

International Friends of the Great Wall will solicit funds as a membership organisation and will also seek the advice of conservation specialists, legal experts and government officials in the 20 townships the Great wall passed through in Beijing municipality.

Mr Lindesay, 46, says his interest in learning more about the environmental quality of the wall took off in 1987, when he spent 78 days jogging and walking along a 2,500km stretch. He has been living in Beijing for the past 13 and half years.

The loss of the wild Wall could become China’s third great lament, after the loss of the city wall and the traditional hutong alleyways,” he warned.