“More than 2,000 years after it was built to keep out their ancestors, Mongolians have succeeded in punching a hole through a large section of the Great Wall of China.” Malcolm Moore reports from Shanghai, on the Telegraph:
Around 300 feet of the wall in a remote part of Inner Mongolia has been irreparably damaged by Mongolian gold prospectors.
“We discovered what had happened a couple of months ago, while doing a national survey on the condition of the Great Wall,” said Wang Dafang, the head of the regional cultural relics department.
“The place where it happened is remote and uninhabited. We might never have found out if the government had not commissioned the inspection survey,” he added.
The damaged section was built by the Qin Dynasty between 220BC and 206BC. Only a tiny segment of the Qin wall remains, which was a reinforced earth barrier unlike the imposing stone structure built by the Ming Dynasty some twelve centuries later.
