How the Great Wall of China Nearly Vanished in the 20th Century
When people see photos of the Great Wall of China today, they usually imagine this endless, solid stone dragon running across the mountains. What most don’t realize is that, not so long ago, the Wall was falling apart so fast that huge stretches almost disappeared from the map.
The 20th century was basically the Great Wall’s midlife crisis: bullets, revolutions, cement mixers, and a lot of people who saw it as a free construction supply store.
Let’s walk through how close we came to losing it.
The Great Wall Was Never One Single Wall
First thing to clear up: the Great Wall isn’t just one wall. It’s a messy network of walls, forts, trenches, and watchtowers built by different dynasties over 2,000 years.
For most of history, it didn’t get treated like a sacred monument. It was a job site, a military line, then later an old piece of infrastructure that no one wanted to maintain. Once it stopped being useful for defense, it slowly turned into “that big old thing over there.”
By the time the 1900s rolled in, a lot of sections were already damaged by erosion, earthquakes, and plain old time. The 20th century just sped everything up.
War Turned the Wall Into a Battlefield and a Barracks
The early 1900s for China were chaos: warlords, foreign invasions, civil war, then World War II.
The Great Wall got dragged into all of that.
Sections were used as defensive positions during battles. Trenches were dug into it.
Forts and towers were turned into bunkers and storage rooms.
Artillery and explosives damaged vulnerable sections.
Military leaders didn’t look at the Wall and think, “Hmm, priceless heritage.” They thought, “Solid high ground. Let’s use it.”
You can imagine what repeated shelling does to a 400-year-old brick wall.
The Great Wall Became a Giant Brick Home Depot
Here’s the part that really hurts: local villagers and even officials spent decades casually stripping bricks, stones, and tiles from the Great Wall for building houses, barns, pigsties, and roads.
Old Wall vs. free building materials? The choice was obvious if you were poor and needed a roof.
In the 20th century, especially in rural areas:
Bricks were pried out and carried home in baskets.
Stones were hauled away for foundations and wells.
Some sections vanished so thoroughly you’d never know a wall had been there.
No bulldozers, no dramatic demolition. Just constant quiet removal, day after day.
The Cultural Revolution: Ideology vs. History
In the 1960s and 70s, during the Cultural Revolution, a lot of old buildings, temples, and monuments were destroyed because they were seen as symbols of the “old” culture.
The Great Wall wasn’t wiped out entirely, but it absolutely took hits:
Some people vandalized it to show revolutionary zeal.
Historical protection wasn’t a priority; political campaigns were.
Repairs slowed, supervision was weak, and neglect did the rest.
The ironic part? The same thing that once protected China from invasions had no protection from China’s own internal political storms.
Industrialization: Cement, Highways, and Bulldozers
As China modernized in the mid-to-late 20th century, machines joined the party.
Roads and railways needed room. Quarries needed stone. Construction projects needed raw material.
In some places:
Wall sections were flattened to make way for roads.
Stones were taken for construction projects.
Tower ruins were treated as obstacles instead of assets.
Imagine a construction planner staring at an old, crumbling wall in the way of a new road and thinking, “Well, that’s inconvenient.” The Wall didn’t always win that argument.
Weather and Time Weren’t Helping Either
Even if humans had behaved perfectly (they didn’t), the Wall still had a natural enemy list: wind, rain, sandstorms, freezing temperatures, roots, and gravity.
In remote parts of Gansu and Inner Mongolia, some sections are made of tamped earth rather than stone. Those are especially fragile. In the 20th century:
Heavy rainstorms washed away wall faces.
Wind eroded surfaces.
Plants grew inside cracks and split them open.
No regular maintenance meant small cracks turned into big collapses. “Leave it alone and hope for the best” is not a great conservation plan.
The Great Wall’s Image Problem
Here’s a weird twist: for much of the early and mid 20th century, the Wall wasn’t treated like the superstar it is now.
It wasn’t always a major tourist symbol. Some Chinese scholars even criticized it in earlier times as a symbol of isolation and wasted human effort.
So:
There wasn’t a strong national campaign to protect every brick.
Limited money and attention went to other priorities: survival, war, rebuilding the country.
The Wall was huge, remote in many stretches, and not at the top of anyone’s to-do list.
Tourism Helped Save It… and Damage It
By the late 20th century, the narrative flipped. The Great Wall became a symbol of China’s national pride and a star attraction for tourists.
That was good and bad.
Good:
Funds and workforce were finally directed into restoration.
Laws were passed to protect cultural relics.
Key sections like Badaling were rebuilt and stabilized.
Bad:
Overcrowding in popular spots meant more wear and tear.
Commercial development around the Wall sometimes got out of hand.
Some “restorations” were a bit too creative and not very authentic.
But overall, tourism gave the Wall political and economic importance. Once visitors started coming from all over the world, tearing it down for bricks suddenly seemed like a terrible idea.
The Turning Point: From Free Brick Pile to Protected Icon
Late 20th century, conservation finally gained real strength:
China passed cultural heritage protection laws.
The Great Wall was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.
Authorities began punishing people for stealing bricks or damaging the Wall.
Did that magically fix everything? No. But it slowed the bleeding.
Today, the biggest problem is less “sudden destruction” and more long, slow decay. Careful work is still going on to stabilize and preserve what’s left.
How Much of the Great Wall Is Actually Left?
Here’s the harsh truth: huge portions of the original Great Wall are gone.
Depending on which sections and time periods you count:
Many watchtowers have collapsed or are barely standing.
Earthen walls have melted back into the landscape.
Some lines survive only in old maps and local stories.
The “picture-perfect” Wall people know—the restored stone ridges near Beijing—is a tiny fraction of the whole system that once existed.
In other words, what you walk on as a tourist is a survivor. And its cousins in less famous provinces weren’t so lucky.
Why This Story Matters Now
So why care about how close the Great Wall came to vanishing last century?
Because it’s a reminder that:
Even giant monuments can disappear if taken for granted.
War, poverty, and short-term thinking can erase thousands of years of history.
Preservation is a choice, not a guarantee.
Every old building, ruin, or wall faces the same basic question: is it worth keeping? The Great Wall barely squeaked by with a “yes.”