China's Great Wall crumbles as tourism soars

[24107]

Empty gin and whisky bottles, crumpled beer cans and tattered food boxes are piled up after a rave in China -- perhaps not so unusual, except that the garbage is on the fabled Great Wall.
The filthy remains of the full-moon techno party, which drew several hundred foreigners to one of the sections of the wall at Badaling, about 60 kilometres (35 miles) from Beijing, left Colombian tourist Francisco Garcia in a sad mood.

"It's very bad for the
environment," Garcia told AFP, summing up a major problem facing Chinese authorities -- how to preserve the UNESCO World Heritage site while allowing visitors to take advantage of its majestic beauty.

China's Great Wall crumbles as tourism soars

 

[24107]

You would think, something as historically valuable as this ( to the Chinese ofcourse), would be maintained better.

 

[donsutherland1]

You would think, something as historically valuable as this ( to the Chinese ofcourse), would be maintained better.

Having been to the Great Wall at Badaling, I can relate to the article's finding. Although the problem wasn't as great when I visited, there was visible litter. While I can appreciate the desire for merchants to be permitted to sell food and beverages in the vicinity of the Great Wall at Badaling, I was left wondering whether the availability of such products is really a good idea. Much better might be a requirement that all food and beverages need to be confined on the premises/grounds on which they are sold. The Great Wall is priceless in terms of China's heritage and also within the context of human history. The inconvenience from modest restrictions on where food and beverages could be consumed would probably be relatively minor compared to the benefits of helping to preserve one of history's treasures.