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Subject: Around 30 percent of China's Ming-era Great Wall has disappeared over time as adversenatural conditions and reckless human activities -- including…
Excerpt: English text from the archived bilingual edition · Chinese edition
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Around 30 percent of China's Ming-era Great Wall has disappeared over time as adversenatural conditions and reckless human activities -- including stealing the bricks to build houses -- erodethe UNESCO World Heritage site, state media reported
In places it is so dilapidated that estimates of its total length vary from 5,600 to 13,000 miles, depending on whether missing sections are included. Despite its length it is not, as is sometimes claimed, visible from space
Of that, 1,200 miles has melted away over the centuries, the Beijing Times reported
Some of the construction weathered away, while plants growing in the walls have accelerated the decay, said the report Sunday, citing a survey last year by the Great Wall of China Society
"Even though some of the walls are built of bricks and stones, they cannot withstandthe perennial exposure to wind and rain," the paper quoted Dong Yaohui, a vice president of the society, as saying
Tourism and local residents' activities are also damaging the longest human construction in the world, the paper added
Poor villagers in Lulong county in the northern province of Hebei used to knock thick grey bricks from a section of wall in their village t o build homes, and slabsengraved with Chinese characters were sold for 30 yuan ($4.80) each by local residents, it said
Under Chinese regulations people who take bricks from the Great Wall can be fined up to 5,000 yuan, the Global Times said on Monday
"But there is no specific organisation to enforce the rules. Damage could only be reported to higher authorities and it is hard to solve when it happened on the border of two provinces," said Jia Hailin, a cultural relics protection official in Hebei, according to the report
It added that explorations of undeveloped parts of the Great Wall -- an increasingly popular leisure activity in recent years -- had brought those sections more tourists than they could bear, damaging them severely
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