WEALTH created the city wall of Pingyao more than 600 years ago. Poverty saved it from destruction by marauding Red Guards in the 1960s. Now the towering four-mile fortification that encircles the ancient town is in danger of tumbling down through neglect.

The wall may be the most perfectly preserved in China, which half a century ago could boast 300 city walls. All but four have crumbled, razed by invading Japanese armies during the Second World War, by Chairman Mao’s zeal to do away with the old, and by economic modernisation.

The other three city walls survive only in sections or jostle for space beside encroaching factory chimneys and faceless blocks of flats. Pingyao’s wall stands proud, as it did six centuries ago. A moat snakes around the base of walls ten metres tall and made of packed earth encased in a crust of dark grey bricks.

Six city gates and four turrets tower over the town where a blockish cinema is the only modern roof jutting out among houses that have stood untouched for centuries.

But all is not well in Pingyao. Dozens of workmen mill around the foot of the wall. Some cut bricks, others sieve cement powder while colleagues tap the wall into place with flat trowels. They have been toiling on the southern corner since more than 17 metres of the wall collapsed on a quiet Sunday afternoon last October. They completed the rebuilding early this summer, but officials acknowledge that they need many more bricks in the wall if Pingyao ’s fortifications are to survive for another 600 years.

“The regular maintenance was inadequate,” Gu Yucai, director of the Cultural Relics Protection Department in Beijing, said when the wall fell down. Officials responded swiftly. With tourism accounting for nearly 17 per cent of Pingyao’s economy last year and with government ambitions to increase that to 30 per cent within five years, more is at stake for the wall than its archaeological import.

“The Government is determined not to let this happen again,” said Hou Shijun, the deputy director of Pingyao’s tourism administration. Experts have completed a study of the wall and their conclusions are being drafted into a masterplan to repair all sections found to be unstable. “We will spend what it costs,” Mr Hou said.

The wall has already been repaired 26 times. Japanese troops razed four corner towers. During the Cultural Revolution, air raid shelters were dug, resulting in a collapse during a flood in 1977. Heavy rains may have been to blame for last year’s collapse, or perhaps the vibrations from motorised rickshaws that carried tourists round the top of the wall until they were banned a couple of years ago.

Mr Hou attributes the wall’s state of preservation to a combination of wealth and poverty. In the 18th century, this remote town in northern Shanxi province was the banking centre of China. But its fortunes declined after the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation put Pingyao’s finance houses out of business by importing modern systems in the mid-19th century.

By the time of the Cultural Revolution, Pingyao was an impoverished backwater where government authorities made their homes and offices in the sprawling courtyard homes of Qing dynasty financiers. Communist cadres had neither the inclination nor the money to pull down the old city and ignored Mao’s call to demolish feudal relics. An Jiayao, of the Archaeology Institute in Beijing, said: “ Development was slow and communications inconvenient, so people saw no need to pull down the wall.”

The challenge now is to ensure sufficient funding to save China’s last perfect city wall from the ravages of nature and neglect.

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