Cleaning Up the Great Wall

Midmorning on Saturday, April 18, four buses arrived at the Jinshanling location of the Great Wall, located 120 kilometers northeast of Beijing. The group consisted not of visitors, but of workers. The job: pick up garbage.

William Lindesay, organizer of the Great Wall Clean-Up Campaign sponsored by the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel, had seen Jinshanling "in true magnificence" 11 years before and "drowning in trash" as recently as three months ago.

Confronted by the tourists' trash, Lindesay questioned the comment by Richard Nixon -"It really is a Great Wall" - made in 1972 during his Ping-Pong diplomacy visit. He asked himself, "Is it really a Great Wall?"

"It obviously wasn't - in the 26 years since Nixon's famous words, tourism growth and the advent of a throw-away consumer society have conspired to desecrate the ancient sanctity and wilderness purity of China's most-endearing symbol of history and culture," Lindesay said."Litter is spoiling the view, intruding on the antiquarian atmosphere and tarnishing the esthetic experience of many visiting the Wall."

Lindesay, a 41-year-old Briton who has built a career around the daring Great Wall Marathon he completed in 1987, was so concerned about the problem that he returned to Beijing to plan the next chapter of his ongoing fascination for China's most famous landmark.

Eleven years ago, the zigzag symbol used to denote the Wall on maps had lured Lindesay, a marathon runner whose best time was 2 hours and 39 minutes, to China and provided the focus for his adventure of a lifetime. He spent 78 days trekking solo along the entire length of the Wall, completing a 2,470-kilometer journey between Jiayuguan in Gansu Province and Shanhaiguan in Hebei Province on the Bohai Sea coast.

"During that odyssey, I realized that the Great Wall was not an object, but a subject," Lindesay said," and that in reaching Shanhaiguan, although my journey was ending, my fascination with the Wall was really just beginning."

He recounted his adventure in Alone on the Great Wall, published in the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany. Since 1987, he has worked in China for eight years, visiting more of the Wall to take photographs, map and write. "I felt both obliged and capable of using this Wall record to take action," he said.

Deciding to mount a clean-up campaign, Lindesay then sought a sponsor to fund various costs including transportation, refreshments and T-shirts. He first approached the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel.

General Manager Bruno Huber, who is from Switzerland, remarked: "When I visited the Wall myself for the first time last year, indeed, the amount of garbage really shocked me. As the first joint venture five-star hotel in Beijing, we had the honor of picking a great name. So just like Lindesay, we wanted to draw attention to this awful litter problem."

Both sponsor and organizer wanted the event to be effective, enjoyable and newsworthy. "We had to enroll enough people to make a measurable impression on a huge problem," Lindesay said. "We wanted hard workers, not holidaymakers, but were determined to give volunteers a weekend to remember, and our efforts needed good press coverage to boost environmental awareness in Beijing."

The multinational effort, with 20 nationalities joining local Beijingers and some overseas Chinese, was launched on the evening of April 17 at a cocktail briefing at the Great Wall Sheraton. Lindesay gave the 170 who gathered a photographic vision of the Wall accumulated during his travels. And he also gave them a warning about being cut on briars and broken glass and the dangers of crumbling 420-year-old mortar.

Next morning a group of 120 collected bags in the hotel lobby and were soon pulling on T-shirts brandished not with "I Climbed the Great Wall" but "I Cleaned the Great Wall." There were also Great Wall postcards, packed lunches, and of course, big bags for the garbage and cotton gloves.

Canadian Charles Clavet, at 12 one of the youngest Great Wall garbage collectors, was surprised by the trash with which he filled his bag - 15 Moet et Chandon champagne bottles, disposable tablecloths and cake boxes.

It was discovered that several five-star hotels use the Wall as a banqueting venue and entrust disposal of their garbage to locals. But they take what is useful and throw the rest into the bushes. "I'm writing to all the luxury hotels, requesting them to take their banquet garbage back to Beijing," Lindesay said.

Another problem was film boxes. "I can't fathom it," said George Lamson, a visiting professor of economics from the United States at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. "People come out here to take photos, and then many of them just toss away their film boxes."

After three hours of work, scratched and sweating participants started to lug their garbage bags down to the parking lot, where a mound started to build.

"'It's been an incredible effort, but it's going to be a hard job to educate millions of people who have little or no environmental awareness," said Graeme Allen, marketing director of the Sheraton. "So we'll be discussing ways of sustaining and improving our campaign."

"The Great Wall is superlative-defying, the most labor-intensive, time- and material-consuming construction project in history. We can't let people trash it. These ancient defenses need defending from irresponsible tourists; otherwise, the Wall will be great no more," said Lindesay.