Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
news of enemy movements back to the capital. But with the Manchus installed in Běijīng
as the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and the Mongol threat long gone, there was little need to
maintain the Wall, and it fell into disrepair.
Ruin & Restoration
The Wall's degeneration accelerated during the war with Japan and then the civil war that
preceded the founding of the new China in 1949. Compounding the problem, the com-
munists didn't initially have much interest in the Wall. In fact, Mao Zedong encouraged
people living near it to use it as a source of free building materials, something that still
goes on unofficially today. It wasn't until 1984 that Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping
ordered that the Wall be restored in places and placed under government protection.
But classic postcard images of the Wall - flawlessly clad in bricks and stoutly undulat-
ing over hills into the distance - do not reflect the truth of the bastion today. While the
sections closest to Běijīng and a few elsewhere have been restored to something approach-
ing their former glory, huge parts of the Wall are either rubble or, especially in the west,
simply mounds of earth that could be anything. Nevertheless, the government does a
much better job of protecting the Wall than it once did, and the time when local authorities
would blast sections of it into dust to make room for roads and new developments is
thankfully gone.
