The Great Wall, photographed by Herbert Ponting in 1907

Yesterday, Reuters had this odd story about the Great Wall.

About locals taking it apart to use as dirt, actually.

The men used excavators to take earth from the remains of part of the Great Wall in Inner Mongolia, built at least 2,200 years ago, to use as landfill for a village factory.

"It's just a pile of earth," Erhaihao village head Hao Zengjun was quoted as telling officials from the Municipal Office on Cultural Relics Protection.

And today, I found this article in the NY Times Sunday travel section with even more detail.

I love the last sentence in this part:

But the Great Wall is not just crumbling. It is disappearing. Roughly half of the estimated 4,000 miles of the wall built during the Ming Dynasty no longer exists, according to a recent report.

It is also regularly being abused. Recently, a company was fined about $50,000 for building a road through a section of the Ming-era wall in Inner Mongolia. Last year, the police broke up a huge dance party of Chinese ravers atop the wall a few hours’ drive outside Beijing.

I mean, priceless historical damage aside, you know that was a party.

But the most interesting part to me was this:

Mao regarded the wall and many other historical relics as remnants of China’s feudal past and saw little justification for preservation. Farmers were encouraged to use bricks to build homes. An entire reservoir outside Beijing was built from bricks and stones taken from the wall.

“The worst destruction came during the 1950s through the 1970s,” said Mr. Dong, the Great Wall Society official. “There was absolutely no protection. And the government encouraged people to take bricks. They didn’t know about tourism. They thought the Great Wall was absolutely useless.”

Today, the new national regulations are part of a government effort to improve protection. Officials concede they still do not truly know how much of the wall remains intact from its western origins in Gansu Province to its eastern terminus at the city of Shanhaiguan, where it touches the Bohai Sea. This year, researchers have launched a long-term project to determine the length and location of the wall by using satellites and other technology.

Nobody knows how big it is. Or how much it might have been worth....