When something has survived, in one form or another, for over 2,000 years, it's tempting to assume it will be around forever. Surely after surviving all those earthquakes, floods, civil wars, and catastrophes, the Great Wall has kinda proved itself invincible. And therein lies the problem. That sentence assumes the Wall did, in fact, survive all the many disasters of Chinese history. In reality, nearly a third of it has completely crumbled away.
This adds up to some 2,000 kilometers of the world's biggest heritage site simply lost forever. The freakiest part is that more of it is vanishing every single day. The Great Wall of China Society estimates only 8.2 percent of the remaining Wall is in good condition, with 74.1 percent so poorly preserved that the last thing you'd want to do is stand beside it during an earthquake or Black Sabbath revival gig. While the Communist Party has recently pulled its act together with preservation, destruction caused by jaw-dropping dumbness still occurs. In 2015, the local government in Ningxia bulldozed a chunk of Wall to make room for farms. Worse still are the tourists. In 2016, China announced it was cracking down on visitors stealing bricks from or leaving graffiti on the Great Wall.
On top of all this, regions of the Wall out in the deserts to the west have been eroded away by sandstorms, leaving whole stretches in disrepair (as you can see above). Unless someone starts pumping some serious money in soon, we'll reach a point where only a tiny, well-preserved section of the Great Wall is left outside Beijing and the rest is just ruins. In other words, now might be the perfect time to book that once-in-a-lifetime trip to China, while there's still some Wall left to see. Just don't make off with any bricks while sightseeing, y'hear?
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