After using an excavator to expand a break in the Great Wall in the northern Shanxi province, two people have been detained in China. In a social media post earlier this week, the Shanxi Cultural Relics Bureau said that the suspects—a man and a woman—had irreparably destroyed the famous building in Youyu County.
The China Daily newspaper stated on Monday that police in Shanxi were notified of the incident on August 24 and followed traces left by equipment used to dig through a portion of the wall to discover the culprits.
According to the publication, the men, who had been hired to work on a nearby construction project, acknowledged using the excavator to carve a bypass in the wall to speed up travel to their job site. According to China Daily, they have been “charged with destroying a cultural relic.”
The Great Wall was originally built in the third century BC, and work on it continued for centuries. The Great Wall is made up of portions that together span thousands of kilometers. A UNESCO World Heritage Site protects the structure’s remnants, which were created by Chinese emperors to stave off foreign invaders.
The impacted portion of China’s Great Wall, which is roughly a six-hour drive west of Beijing, was built during the Ming Dynasty, which ruled from the 14th to the 17th centuries.
The Ming-era wall, described as a “relatively intact” part of substantial research value, was alleged to have suffered “irreversible damage” by the suspects, according to Chinese state media CCTV. Footage captured the aftermath of the incident, when a dusty track had been carved through a length of elevated land that seemed to be the ruins of the old barrier.
