Western Great Wall renovation nears completion

A 195-million-yuan (about 30 million U.S. dollars) program to repair and protect western parts of the Great Wall in Gansu province is nearing completion, local cultural relics authority said.

Repairs of the Great Wall along Jiayuguan city, including the Jiayu Pass, a world heritage, started in May, 2012.

About 95 percent of the renovation, including reinforcing wooden structures, restoring paintings, building drainage systems and installing flood and fire control facilities, have been completed, said Wang Tuan, deputy director of Jiayuguan City cultural relics bureau.

A few small repairs are all that is needed to finalize the renovation, Wang said.

Most of western sections of the Great Wall are built from mud rather than stone and many parts have been eroded by sandstorms and wrongly exploited by farmers.

Experts created different types of mud as replica of original materials to mend the damaged sections, said Wang.

Jiayu Pass is the starting point of a section of the Great Wall constructed during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). More than one million tourists visit the heritage site last year.

The Great Wall was first built during the reign of China's first emperor Qin Shihuang (259-210 B.C.) to keep out foreign invaders.

It stretches over 22,000 kilometers through 10 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in northern China, including Liaoning, Hebei, Tianjin, Beijing, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Ningxia, Gansu and Qinghai