‘Botched’ repair to China’s Great Wall sparks outrage

[chahlley]

(World Today Saturday 24 September 2016)

‘Botched’ repair to China’s Great Wall sparks outrage

Poor preservation effort leaves stretch of the wall looking  like a white concrete lane

A villager sitting on a restored section of the Great Wall in Suizhong.

It was repaired by slapping a white substance on top of the crumbling stones. Photo: AP

BEIJING — The Great Wall of China: A stirring symbol of national pride, whose overlapping sections span thousands of kilometres. A crumbling, melancholy monument to China’s  imperial grandeur, so imposing that it inspired the stubborn myth that it is visible from the moon.

One part of the Great Wall is even more visible now, but for all the wrong reasons.

Chinese preservationists, Internet users and media commentators have been incensed this week after pictures showed that officials repaired part of the Great Wall in north-east China by slapping a white substance on top of the crumbling, weathered stones.

A once unkempt, haunting, 700-year-old stretch of the wall now looks like a concrete skateboarding lane dumped in the wilderness.

The aesthetic impact was “not ideal”, conceded the head of the provincial cultural relics bureau, Mr Ding Hui, according to The Beijing News. “The repairs really don’t look good,” he said.
Many people, including experts on preserving the Great Wall, went much further in condemning the repairs to the section, in Suizhong county in the province of Liaoning.

“This was vandalism done in the name of preservation,” said Mr Liu Fusheng, a park officer from the county who first raised an outcry about the work, in a telephone interview. “Even the little kids here know that this  repair of the Great Wall was botched.”

Newspapers also lamented the  repair. The Beijing News, widely read in the capital, put the ruination of the ruins on its front page.

The repairs to the 1.9km section of the wall were undertaken two years ago but came to wide attention only on Wednesday, after a local newspaper, The Huashang Morning News, described what had been done in the name of preservation.

Mr Liu, who helped draw attention to the work, said officials commissioned the repairs because they
were worried the wall would collapse entirely from erosion and tourists walking on top. But, in their haste, they wiped out the gnarled features that people had come to treasure, including the crenelations and towers, he said.

“It’s like a head that’s lost its nose and ears,” said Mr Liu, who has spent 15 years studying that section of the wall. Once the towers there had stone carvings, but they had fallen to the ground before the repairs, he said.

“They didn’t restore the carvings back to where they belonged and just tossed them aside. They used new bricks to fill in the original spots, and that saved a lot of expense,” he added.

Construction of that section of the wall started in 1381, part of the sprawling web of fortifications and protections that Ming dynasty emperors built to ward off and police marauding nomads from the steppes.

But now, city dwellers who come to marvel at the isolated section of the wall in Suizhong county leave wondering why they bothered to travel so far to see a strip of concrete, one villager told The Huashang Morning News.

Officials have sworn that they did not use cement but rather a mix of lime and sand. Mr Liu said they used both.

In an interview, Mr Dong Yaohui, a vice-chairman of the China Great Wall Society and an expert on preserving the wall, called the attempt an “extremely rudimentary mistake”.

“Our principle in repairing the Great Wall is to minimise interference,” said Mr Dong. “It’s not important whether you used lime or cement. Repairing it like this has wiped out all the culture and history.”

One villager, Zhang Yuwu, who worked on the repairs two years ago saw a silver lining to the topping.

“Now the top of the Great Wall has become a smooth pavement,” he said. “When it rains or snows, it’s a lot easier to walk on than before.”  THE NEW YORK TIMES