In September, it was reported that the Chinese authorities had arrested two people suspected of causing irreversible damage to the Great Wall. The two are said to have used an excavator to knock a large hole through the wall, allowing motor vehicles to pass more quickly to and from a nearby construction site in Shanxi province, where they were both employed. The Great Wall – actually, a composite of many smaller walls, built over many years and then connected – was started almost three thousand years ago, to protect the northern border of the Chinese empire, and is over 21 thousand kilometres in length. It is designated a UNESCO heritage site and is today a major tourist attraction. In other words, what was started as a project to keep people out of China has transformed into a project to bring them to China (at least, temporarily). The hole in the Great Wall will be expensive to repair and the two workers, who have been charged with damaging a cultural relic rather than a military border post, will no doubt be punished for their crime.
The same month that workers were creating a short-cut through the Great Wall, some unknown person(s) used a chainsaw to cut down a two-hundred-year-old sycamore tree, that stood at an iconic point along Hadrian’s Wall, in the north of England. (This site had become famous as a location from a film version of the story of Robin Hood, made in 1991, although why Robin would travel to Northumbria on his way from the English Channel to Nottinghamshire remains a mystery.) Hadrian’s Wall was built slightly less than two thousand years ago, to protect the northern border of the Roman empire and is merely 120 kilometres in length. Nonetheless, it is also a UNESCO heritage site and a modest tourist attraction. Many local people were outraged by the felling of the tree – which appears to have caused some minor damage to a section of the wall – for which there seems to have been no reason other than a perverse desire to vandalise an object of natural beauty. Arrests have been made but no-one has yet been charged with a crime associated with the tree felling.
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