A 2024 Survey Found 1.7km of Wall Missing

In 2024, a routine drone survey conducted by the Hebei Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau revealed something alarming that no one had predicted: a 1.7-kilometer section of the Great Wall near the village of Laoniuwan, on the border between Hebei and Shanxi provinces, had effectively vanished. Not collapsed or eroded—vanished. The stones had been carried away by local residents over decades, repurposed into house foundations, animal pens, and road base for a new village access road. The section, which dated to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and had been officially protected under China’s Cultural Relics Protection Law since 1961, was classified as “Grade A protected heritage.” Yet it was gone—stone by stone, year by year, in full view of a village of 200 people, until there was nothing left but the earthen core of the wall, which itself was now rapidly eroding into the surrounding farmland.

The Laoniuwan case is not an outlier. It is a symptom of a crisis that threatens the survival of China’s ancient architectural heritage on a scale that conservation officials are only beginning to acknowledge publicly. A comprehensive 2025 survey by the Chinese Academy of Cultural Heritage, published in collaboration with UNESCO’s Beijing office, assessed the condition of 429 major ancient architectural sites across 28 provinces and found that 37% were in “poor” or “critical” condition—meaning that without major intervention within the next five to ten years, they would suffer irreversible structural damage or complete collapse. The survey covered a broad range of structures: sections of the Great Wall, Ming and Qing dynasty temples, Tang dynasty pagodas, ancient city walls, and traditional vernacular villages. The results were strikingly consistent across categories.

The Great Wall of China at Badaling — Photo: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Numbers Behind the Crisis

The Great Wall is the most visible—and most studied—case. China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage released updated figures in 2025 showing that of the 21,196 kilometers of wall sections identified in the landmark 2012 national survey, approximately 31% remained visible as standing structure, 37% had degraded to low earth mounds that were difficult to distinguish from the surrounding terrain, and 32% had “entirely disappeared”—no longer traceable at ground level. That last figure is significant: almost one-third of the Great Wall, by length, has already been lost. At current rates of degradation, the 2025 report projected that an additional 12% would be effectively lost by 2035.

The causes are a combination of natural and human factors that compound each other in ways that make simple solutions ineffective. Natural weathering—wind erosion, freeze-thaw cycles, rainwater infiltration—accounts for roughly 40% of structural degradation. The wall’s traditional construction material, a compacted earth-and-gravel mixture called “rammed earth” covered with stone or brick facing, is vulnerable to water: once the outer brick skin is breached, water penetrates the earth core, causing it to swell, crack, and collapse from within. Climate change is accelerating the process. A 2024 study in the journal Heritage Science analyzed 40 years of meteorological data along the Great Wall’s northern corridor and found that the frequency of extreme precipitation events—rainfall exceeding 50mm in 24 hours—had increased by 34% since 1980. Each extreme event sends a pulse of water through sections of the wall that were never designed for such loads.

But natural weathering alone does not explain the disappearance of entire sections. Human activity is the dominant factor for roughly 55% of the wall’s losses, according to the CACH survey. The Laoniuwan case illustrates one category: direct stone removal for construction materials. A 2023 investigation by the Beijing News found that in five Hebei villages adjacent to the wall, over 90% of residential buildings examined had incorporated stone taken from nearby wall sections. The practice is not necessarily illegal in the local understanding—many villagers recall that during the 1960s and 1970s, local officials actively encouraged the removal of wall stones for building materials as a form of “resource utilization.” The Cultural Relics Protection Law has since made such removal a criminal offense, but enforcement in remote areas is minimal and the accumulated loss is irreversible.

Tourism: The Double-Edged Sword

The second major human factor is tourism—the same economic engine that has funded much of China’s heritage preservation also threatens to destroy the sites it celebrates. Badaling, the most visited section of the Great Wall near Beijing, received 9.7 million visitors in 2025, according to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism—a 22% increase from pre-pandemic 2019. The section was designed to handle approximately 3 million visitors per year. The result is accelerating physical wear: stone steps polished smooth and dangerously slippery by millions of feet, handrails worn to the point of structural weakness, vegetation stripped from the steep slopes above and below the wall. The Mutianyu section, farther from Beijing, has experienced a similar surge, reaching 3.8 million visitors in 2025 and reporting a 17% increase in “urgent” maintenance requests compared to 2023.

The tension between preservation and access is not unique to the Great Wall. UNESCO’s 2025 State of Conservation report for World Heritage Sites in China highlighted 14 sites where “insufficient management of tourism pressure” was identified as a primary threat. Among them: the Forbidden City (19 million annual visitors), the Temple of Heaven (8 million), and the ancient town of Lijiang (15 million overnight visitors plus an estimated 20 million day-trippers). The report specifically noted that “visitor numbers at several Chinese World Heritage sites have exceeded the carrying capacity established in the site management plans by factors of 2 to 4, resulting in physical deterioration that is accelerating faster than conservation resources can address.”

The response has been a mix of good intentions and contested outcomes. The Great Wall Protection and Restoration Project, launched in 2019 with a budget of 2.8 billion RMB ($387 million) over 10 years, has completed 143 restoration projects on 285 kilometers of wall sections as of 2025. But some of these restorations have generated their own controversy. In 2023, a section near the village of Dajingmen in Hebei Province was restored using modern cement mortar instead of traditional lime-based mortar—a choice that conservatively violates the Venice Charter’s principle of “honest restoration” and that, according to heritage architects, may cause more long-term damage than leaving the section unrestored. The cement prevents moisture from evaporating through the wall, trapping water inside the rammed-earth core and accelerating internal decay.

Beyond the Wall: Vernacular Architecture Under Pressure

While the Great Wall receives the most attention, the crisis extends to vernacular architecture—the traditional wooden courtyard houses, stilted diaojiaolou, tulou roundhouses, and stone villages that constitute the vast majority of China’s pre-modern built heritage. A 2025 survey by the China National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites found that of 8,700 identified traditional villages in China, 31% had lost more than half of their traditional building stock since 2010. The drivers are straightforward: rural-to-urban migration has left many traditional homes abandoned, and the lack of regular maintenance in humid climates accelerates decay exponentially. A traditional timber-framed house in southern China that receives annual maintenance can stand for 200 years. One that is abandoned after the family moves to the city can become structurally unsound within a decade.

The economic logic works against preservation. A traditional farmhouse in Fujian province requires approximately 30,000-50,000 RMB per year in maintenance—replacing roof tiles, repairing termite damage, treating wooden columns for rot. The same house, if replaced with a concrete-block structure, can be built for 80,000 RMB and requires minimal maintenance for 20 years. For a rural household with an annual income of 40,000 RMB, the choice is economically rational, even if it means the loss of a building that has stood for two centuries. The challenge for heritage preservation is to make traditional construction economically competitive with modern alternatives—a challenge that no country has fully solved.

The Restoration Debate: Authenticity vs. Safety

A deeper, more philosophical debate underpins the preservation crisis: what does it mean to “save” an ancient structure? The Dajingmen cement controversy is one symptom of a broader tension between two schools of conservation. The first, aligned with the Venice Charter and international heritage standards, holds that restoration should use historically accurate materials and techniques, preserve the patina of age, and make repairs distinguishable from original fabric. The second, more common in Chinese practice, holds that the primary goal of restoration is to make the structure safe, stable, and usable for the public—even if that means using modern materials.

The Chinese approach has deep cultural roots. In traditional Chinese architecture, the periodic rebuilding of structures was considered part of their life cycle—temples were rebuilt, pagodas reconstructed, even the Forbidden City underwent major renovations every few centuries. The idea that a building should be preserved in its current state as a fixed historical artifact is a Western concept that did not exist in Chinese architectural culture before the 20th century. “We are applying a European preservation framework to a Chinese architectural tradition that operated on completely different principles,” noted a professor of architectural history at Tsinghua University in a 2024 academic symposium. “The result is that we are neither preserving the buildings authentically, nor allowing them to live as they traditionally did.”

This philosophical tension has practical consequences. The Great Wall restoration budget of 2.8 billion RMB sounds substantial but must be spread across 21,000 kilometers. On a per-kilometer basis, it amounts to approximately 133,000 RMB ($18,400) per kilometer over 10 years—barely enough for one small section of stairway repointing. The budget for vernacular village preservation is even smaller: the National Traditional Village Protection Program allocated 1.5 billion RMB in 2024 for grants to over 2,800 villages, averaging roughly 535,000 RMB per village. For context, restoring a single medium-sized tulou roundhouse in Fujian costs between 1 and 3 million RMB.

Is There a Path Forward?

Several initiatives offer reason for cautious optimism. The China Great Wall Cultural Park project, launched in 2021, is an attempt to integrate preservation with sustainable tourism by designating 27 “key conservation demonstration sections” where intensive management, visitor limits, and professional restoration can be concentrated. The project has already reduced unauthorized visitation by 40% in pilot zones and increased the proportion of restoration projects using traditional materials from 22% to 58% between 2021 and 2025. The model—concentrating resources on a limited number of high-priority sections rather than spreading them thin—is controversial among heritage activists who argue it writes off the rest, but the results are measurable.

Technology offers another avenue. The CACH’s 2025 survey used satellite imagery and AI-based change detection to identify unauthorized construction near protected sites, flagging 1,200 potential violations in 2024 alone. Drone-based thermography can identify weak points in wall structures that are invisible to ground-level inspection. 3D laser scanning has been used to create millimeter-accurate digital models of 4,700 heritage structures, providing a baseline against which future degradation can be measured. These tools are not cheap, but they are cheaper than rebuilding a collapsed section of wall.

The real question, though, is whether the political will and the funding will be sustained. China’s heritage preservation budget has grown roughly 15% annually since 2018, reaching approximately 12 billion RMB in 2025. But that is a fraction of what the country spends on high-speed rail (800+ billion RMB annually) or even on urban park construction. The UNESCO report noted that China’s spending on preservation as a share of GDP (0.02%) lags behind Italy (0.08%), France (0.06%), and even the United Kingdom (0.04%). China has more ancient structures to protect than any of those countries, and they are spread across a much larger geographic area. The scale of the problem demands a scale of resources that has not yet been committed.

On a visit to the Laoniuwan site in early 2026, a Hebei provincial heritage official told reporters that the vanished 1.7-kilometer section could not be rebuilt. “The materials have been dispersed,” he said. “The original structural knowledge of that specific section—how the stones were fitted, the exact composition of the rammed earth, the drainage pattern—is lost. We can stabilize the remaining sections, but we cannot bring back what is gone.” His words were honest, but they also describe an approach that, if applied consistently, means accepting the loss of a third of China’s most iconic monument within a generation. Whether that is an acceptable outcome is a question that no one in power has yet been willing to answer.