By Shi Fang, Bi Mengying, People’s Daily
Emergency and abnormality detection for the Great Wall, located in mountainous areas, has long
been a tricky issue, but now an electronic inspection system is changing history.
Beijing’s Huairou District, home to sections of the Great Wall, recently equipped each of its 131
conservators with an electronic device that reports their locations every two minutes. With the
device, the conservators can also report problems they spot by sending photos to relevant
departments of cultural relics.
The system proved its value soon after its debut. On June 2, it added a new piece of cultural relic –
a pedestal – to the collection of the Huairou Museum.
The pedestal was spotted by conservator Li Binglong in the bushes near the Great Wall when he
was on patrol. He soon took a photo and reported his finding to relevant authorities, as instructed
during the training.
“This machine came in very handy. Li and I immediately uploaded a photo of the pedestal when
we found it. Soon we received a call from the head of Huairou’s cultural heritage authority, and
the pedestal was sent to the Huairou Museum,” said Li Linyuan, a Great Wall conservator in
Huairou’s Yanxi township.
Shen Wei, one of the developers of the system, introduced that the location and patrol route of
every conservator on duty in Huairou district is shown by the system in real time on a big screen
of the command center. With the system, each township in the district can have a grasp of the
conservators’ work and receive the information they transmit.
“It was very hard to find scribbling, damages to the walls or injured hikers in the past as we
always spent a huge amount of time negotiating with conservators over the locations. Sometimes
we couldn’t find these locations without the conservators leading the way,” said Guo Dapeng,
deputy director of Huairou Cultural Commission. “Thanks to this system, we can now get to the
accurate location very quickly,” he said.
“The system also protects the conservators, as it enables us to know exactly where they are if an
accident happens during the patrol in the perilous mountains,” Guo added.
Besides, the system also serves as a real-time messenger for conservators in the same town. “We
can inform our colleagues instantly when off-route tourists head to other directions,” said Wang
Guijiang, a conservator of Dazhenyu village, Bohai township.
Equipped with this new instrument, conservators now patrol in key areas on a regular basis, and
the photos they upload will form a data base that helps future Great Wall reservation.
“If I find a crack in the wall, I can take a picture of it every day to keep track of it, see if it’s
getting bigger,” said Wang.
More functions of the system are to be expected in the future, such as alarming and video calls,
which helps the conservators to handle emergencies such as forest fires and floods together with
other departments.
