The earthquake which struck northern China earlier this month left cracks in parts of the 5,000-km Great Wall, it emerged yesterday. The damage occurred at the epicentre of the earthquake north-west of Beijing along a portion of the wall little frequented by tourists.
"The section of the Great Wall in the whole area has suffered certain degrees of cracking," said Mr He Yong, director of the local Administration of Cultural Relics. "The cracks are about the width of a person's thumb."
The earthquake on January 10th measured 6.2 on the Richter scale, and left at least 50 people dead, more than 10,000 injured and over 100,000 homeless in a mountainous area near the city of Zhangjiakou.
More than 20 ancient buildings are reported to be located in the earthquake zone which contains a curving section of the Great Wall running north-west and then south-west from Zhangjiakou, built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD). The earliest parts of the wall date back 2,000 years to the Qin Dynasty when, according to legend, the bodies of dead workers were used as material to bind the stones.
In recent years easily accessible stretches of the Great Wall have been restored and it has become China's foremost tourist attraction.
A high-speed toll freeway has just been completed linking Beijing with Badaling, the nearest point of the wall to the capital, and the two-hour excursion has become obligatory for official visitors, delegations and tourists.
Badaling, however, is now an overcrowded tourist centre, with dozens of shops and fast-food joints (including a Kentucky Fried Chicken), hundreds of aggressive souvenir vendors, a chair-lift and camels for tourist photographs.