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By Wang Zhuoqiong and Hu Yinan (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-12-21 07:51

Despite "unprecedented" State and public attention, protection of the country's relics still faces "unparalleled challenges", a top cultural official said Thursday.

"The protection of our relics is at a most dangerous, urgent and critical period," Shan Jixiang, director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, said during an address to provincial and municipal cultural chiefs in Beijing.

Field experts such as Zhang Songlin, head of the relics research administration in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan Province, agreed.

"Industrialization and modernization have now entered an all-out phase," Zhang said.

"It used to take a decade or two to see a city change. Now, urban landscapes change completely in two or three years.

"And the pace and magnitude of such construction inevitably leads to large-scale damage of cultural relics.

"In particular, construction in large and medium-sized cities has brought the greatest, fastest and most deep-seated destruction. Machinery has completely ruined many relics overnight," Zhang said.

And the destruction is "irreparable," he said.

"It erases them from the Earth entirely in the end, our generation may well have destroyed and depleted the majority of mankind's most precious relics."

Zhang said he had witnessed many clashes between his fellow archaeologists and real estate developers.

"In Zhengzhou, which locates in the center area of the Xia and Shang civilizations and has more than 2,700 years of history, 30 percent of local developers begin construction before we are even aware of their projects and all of a sudden, nothing's left," he said.

Officials have increasingly shifted their attention to protecting cultural heritage across the country, he said.

Government subsidies to help protect relics, for example, increased by 223 percent, from 4.4 billion yuan ($600 million) between 1997 and 2001, to 14.24 billion yuan over the past five years. But according to Shan, considerable work remains to be done to preserve historical sites and balance the needs of relic protection with urban development.

These include efforts at both the Three Gorges Dam and the $25-billion South-to-North Water Diversion Project, he said.

Numerous cultural relics, including sites that date back 4,000 years, will be submerged along the 1,300-km route of the latter, which is scheduled for completion in 2010, Shan said.