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.

Source: Xinhua