WILLIAM LINDESAY, the Briton who in 1987 became the first foreigner to run the length of the Great Wall of China, is putting the finishing touches to an almost equally ambitious project.

His exhibition of photographs of the Great Wall at the Beijing Capital Museum in January, titled Great Wall Revisited, will show the changes wrought in the past century by Man and Nature.

This week the China approved for the first time laws to protect the Great Wall. It has banned the carving of names, digging out of bricks or building of unauthorised structures. However, a survey in June found that 20 per cent of the wall’s 6,300 kilometres was in reasonable shape, 30 per cent was in ruins and the rest had disappeared.

Mr Lindesay has spent two years wading through photograph archives in search of the oldest images of its vanished sections. He has trekked to the exact spots where explorers took photographs 100 or even 150 years ago.

At dawn on a chilly autumn morning Mr Lindesay crouched in front of his tripod waiting for the first rays of sun on the mud bricks of the Jade Gate. Twenty centuries ago this remote outpost, now in lonely splendour in the westernmost deserts of Gansu province, marked the Silk Road’s entrance in and out of China.

The explorer Sir Aurel Stein took a photograph from this spot 100 years ago. Today, Mr Lindesay positions himself to shoot the same image; lost in the desert, preserved by the dry climate and far from the depredations of man, the Jade Gate is a rare example of good preservation.

It is a far cry from the reconstructed and crowded sections of the wall near Beijing that are familiar to most tourists.

Sir Aurel would no doubt be delighted to recognise the spot. But Mr Lindesay is not overly sanguine as he stands in front of a yet more remote ancient mound of reeds, stored to light beacon fires 2,000 years ago and preserved by the desert.

“Just because someone has lived to 80 doesn’t mean they’ll live another 80 years. We can’t say that the wall will survive for another 2,000 years.”

Mr Lindesay has taken more than 150 photographs at the sites where earlier visitors made their records. Reaching such remote corners of China, some closed to visitors, has been no easy task.

He spent six days walking along the wall in neighbouring Ningxia province, camping in the snow in search of a location early this year. He and his companions trudged for 20 km under the blazing desert sun of Gansu in search of the original site of a Stein photograph. They did not find it.

During his run along the wall Mr Lindesay was arrested nine times and deported once.

This time China wants publicity for its new regulations to protect this ancient defence line, and the Beijing Bureau of Cultural Relics has given its official seal of approval to the project.

Mr Lindesay has been awarded a CBE for raising awareness of the neglect that the wall has suffered.

The message is an urgent one. Cheng Dalin, president of China’s Great Wall Research Society, singled out tourism as the greatest source of damage in a 2004 survey, followed by destruction to modernise infrastructure, the elements and local residents.

No one knows the length of the Wall since its many different sections were built by various dynasties over more than 2,000 years. But studies by experts such as Mr Cheng offer a warning that most of it is under threat.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT

• It has been believed that the Great Wall is the only man-made object visible from space. The claim fails on two counts — not only is it not visible, but other objects are, such as the 2,500-year-old Grand Canal of China
• The wall receives ten million visitors annually, the majority in a 10km section open to tourists near Beijing
• Locals have been using parts of the wall near big cities for parties and all-night raves, a practice banned from this year
• Much of the wall is in disrepair and estimates of its true length vary from 2,500 to more than 6,000km
• Although impressive, on more than one occasion invaders had little problem overcoming the obstacle — reputedly they just bribed the gatekeeper

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