At the Tuesday event, reporters from a number of media outlets were invited to visit the Jiankou Great Wall, which is under repair until the end of June, in the northern Huairou District of Beijing. With a total length of 7,952 meters, the Jiankou Great Wall was built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) on steep mountains and is left with incomplete walls and ruins after erosion and wars over the past hundreds of years. According to Shu Xiaofeng, director of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Administration, the repair will only renovate walls that are likely to fall or endanger people passing by, while the appearance of other safe walls will not be changed. "We always follow the principle and idea of minimum intervention, insisting on solving problems harming the Great Wall's safety, especially the stability of its structure, by minimum human intervention," Shu said. The existing relics of the Great Wall are results of human activity and natural factors over the past thousands of years, said Song Xinchao, who stressed preventing improper interventions and putting an end to "rebuilding the Great Wall." In January, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the National Cultural Heritage Administration jointly released a comprehensive conservation plan to establish a long-term mechanism for the conservation and utilization of the Great Wall. |