From BBC:
“[in China]… it is money that matters, not history.”
从电视里听到这句话很不舒服,但是很多时候确实是这样,引以为戒吧。。。
Some excerpts from an report:
“It was like us going to a lecture and seeing photos of Mars or Venus,” explained William Lindesay, curator of the Beijing Capital Museum’s new photo exhibition, “The Great Wall Revisited: From the Jade Gate to Old Dragon’s Head,” which opened on Jan. 5 and runs to Feb. 25.[in Beijing]
……Thus was born the current exhibition (co-organized byInternational Friends of the Great Wall and the Beijing Administration of Cultural Heritage) in which 72 old photographs are paired with 72 rephotographs, the images together presenting a record of desecration and preservation, ruin and endurance.
The original photographs were taken between 1871-1937 during what Lindesay calls “a golden period, before the Wall was damaged by the Sino-Japanese war, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.” They cover the length of the Wall, from the desert in the west (the Jade Gate) to where it meets the sea in the east (Old Dragon’s Head). With one exception, the photographs were all taken by foreigners.
“…… A section photographed by the archaeologist Aurel Stein in Gansu Province around 1910 was then unbroken for seven miles, but Lindesay found that it is now crossed by “two rail lines, 17 power lines, the west to east gas line, 15 dirt roads, one main road, an abandoned main road and the G-312 expressway - which is actually routed under the Wall.”

William Lindesay at the Jade Gate reshooting an image taken by Aurel Stein in 1907. (Wang Tong )
When confronted with such deterioration - or destruction - Lindesay interviewed elderly locals about the cause. In the case of the vanished towers, he was variously told that they had been sabotaged by Chinese soldiers so the Japanese couldn’t use them; that they had been bombed by the Japanese because Chinese gunners were using them; and that Japanese soldiers had forced the Chinese villagers to dismantle them because the Wall was a symbol of China.
In the “golden period” when early Great Wall photographs were taken, the Wall had almost no visitors. Today, it receives roughly 10 million visitors a year, with most of these going to the Badaling section, which on one peak October day received 119,000 visitors. The sheer magnitude of these numbers is brought home in the exhibition by the pairing of an 1880 photo showing the empty Wall at Badaling snaking through pristine wilderness and the rephotograph in which the same section is so mobbed with tourists that you can barely see the Wall itself.