It was to have been the world’s longest dragon, snaking its 21km (13mile) concrete body through a national forest park along a mountain ridge.

Now it will never uncoil its tail. A campaign by China’s increasingly vocal environmental activists has made a white elephant of the ambitious project.

Wu Mingzuo, director of the Henan Ecology Society, said: “Building such a huge cement architecture is like putting an expressway in a national park. It will not only damage vegetation and jeopardise the integrity of the landscape but will also destroy the local ecological system.”

Local officials in central Henan province heeded the activists and have called a halt to construction. Their decision was prompted in part by a report from the State Environmental Protection Agency, which said it may even demand the demolition of the dragon’s head and the 800 metres of its body already completed.

Environmentalists were not alone – in a survey by Sina.com, the internet portal, more than 90 per cent of respondents opposed the project.

Construction began in April 2002 when a man identified only as Guo Shenghai, believed to be an overseas Chinese whose family originated in Henan, planned to invest 300 million yuan (£20 million) in the concrete beast. Authorities in the town of Xinzheng stopped work in early 2003, saying the developer had failed to obtain a licence for the use of the land or to pass an environmental assessment.

But the dragon was not so easily slayed. The local Zulong company took over the project in late 2005 and restarted work in March this year, boasting that the finished beast would rival the Great Wall.

Li Xiong, president of Zulong, said the dragon, inextricably linked to Chinese myth and legend, and emblem of the emperors, would be a symbol to unite China’s 56 ethnic minorities, symbolised by the 5.6 million scales of jade or gold-coated bronze with which it was to be finished. “People can pay to carve words in the scales, and inside the body there will be trains and clubs,” he said. “Our ancestors built the Great Wall, and now I am building the great dragon. I will succeed.”

Zulong’s ambition was to complete the dragon in time for the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China, on October 1, 2009. But local officials ruled that the scheme was simply a commercial promotion.

When the controversy erupted, Li Shumin, Zulong board chairman, offered to rein in the dragon, curtailing its length to just 960 metres – to symbolise China’s land area of 9.6 million square kilometres – and to complete it before the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

A commentary in the state-run China Daily was unequivocal about the dragon builders’ motives. “Yes, it is a white elephant, but it can be a white elephant that generates an endless stream of revenues and profits, probably for 2,000 years for the investors and operators.”

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