Recently another incident of cultural relic destruction happened in Dingbian County, Shaanxi Province, not long after the Han-dynasty Tomb in Haotan was scrambled and demolished. Without the permission from the local administration of cultural relics protection, some local construction companies built highways by breaking the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), resulting in a total damage of three sections of the Great Wall.

The three damaged sections of the Great Wall are located adjacent to the three towns of Anbian, Zhuanjing and Dingbian. The three side-roads of the Jingbian-Wangquanliang Highway which lead to the three towns respectively go right through the Great Wall, cutting three 30-40 meters wide openings in the wall.

According to the reporter of the Xi’an-based Chinese Business Review (Hua Shang Bao), those destroyed parts of the Great Wall were all in good condition, with a height of four meters and a width of 5-6 meters.

The destruction took place from late April to early May this year when the road-building companies began the construction of three side-roads.

According to the Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics that took effect in 1992, construction around a cultural relic must be strictly examined to ensure that it will not cause any damage.

Considering the construction of the roads might damage the Great Wall, in March, the Culture and Sports Bureau of Dingbian County notified the construction companies, including the Shaanxi Road and Bridge Company, Yan’an Tongsheng Company and Yulin Tianyuan Company, to go through relevant measures before they started the project, according to Li Huanbing, a clerk with the Culture and Sports Bureau of Dingbian County. However, none of the above mentioned companies paid any attention to the issue.

So when the Culture and Sports Bureau of Dingbian County received the report from its counterpart in Yulin in late April, the Great Wall had already been cut through. Again the bureau contacted the construction companies but could not stop them. As a result, three sections of the Great Wall, 30 meters in Anbian, 35 meters in Zhuanjing, and 40 meters in Dingbian were destroyed. 

As for this incident, the Culture and Sports Bureau of Dingbian County on May 12 made a decision to order the construction units to stop their work, pay a fine of 30,000 yuan and go through the procedures as soon as possible.

This severe incident attracted attention from the Shaanxi Provincial Administration of Cultural Heritage, who immediately sent some experts to investigate the issue.

On June 1, the Shaanxi Provincial Administration of Cultural Heritage issued the document An Urgent Notice on the Cultural Relics Destruction in the Jingbian-Wangquanliang Highway Construction, which ordered the concerned companies to stop their construction work inside the Great Wall preservation area at once, and charged each of them a fine of 500,000 yuan. The 1.5 million yuan collected will be used for the repair and protection of the Great Wall. 

The local departments concerned were asked to strengthen education on the Law on Protection of Cultural Relics, intensify punishment to violations and try every means to avoid such kind of incidents in the future.

(China.org.cn by Zheng Guihong, July 31, 2003)