OPINION> Commentary
Price of ignorance
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-12 07:40

It is sad to see cultural relics being damaged out of ignorance. Measures to protect them or crackdowns on vandals may help, but these can hardly protect cultural relics from being damaged by people who have no idea of what they are doing.

A survey of more than 10,000 residents in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region shows that nearly 90 percent of them do not even know that there are sections of the ancient Great Wall in the region.

In fact, the total length of the Great Wall built during different dynasties in the region accounts for slightly less than a third of the total length of the wall.

No wonder that different sections of this cultural heritage have been frequently damaged either by construction projects or by individuals. When they were caught in the act, some did not even know that they were vandalizing the country's most precious cultural heritage.

In the latest case, five local residents were sentenced to prison for one to three years in September for causing the collapse of a 23-m section of the Great Wall built in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). They were mining iron ore at the foot of the wall when they were caught by local police officers.

They were reported to have told the judge that they never knew it was a crime to do so. And neither did they know about the stipulation that areas within 200 m of the Great Wall are off-limits to any activities that may possibly damage the heritage.

As the first case of its kind, it sets a precedent for similar cases in the future. And the news about it on the print media, Internet and TV has a message for local residents in the autonomous region. The message is that they must make sure they are not vandalizing a cultural heritage before they start any project in the vicinity of an old structure.

With a civilization of more than 5,000 years behind us, we have a great number of cultural heritages of different types. They help us know how our ancestors lived and many more things about them hundreds or thousands of years ago. We find our own cultural identity from these heritages.

We simply cannot take it for granted that they are not that essential to our existence.

What's more, they are precious because they would be gone for good and never be retrieved once they were destroyed.

The survey in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region should serve as a wake-up call to cultural heritage protection departments at all levels. These authorities should know much work remains to be done to make ordinary residents, especially those in underdeveloped areas, aware of the importance of protecting cultural heritages.

It is sad if large numbers of people have little knowledge about their nation's history. It should be even more tragic that some of its cultural heritages are damaged or even destroyed by people simply because they have no idea about what they are doing.

There is an urgent need for us to disseminate knowledge about cultural heritage before it is too late.

(China Daily 11/12/2008 page8)