About 80,000 bricks of ancient Nanjing City Wall are collected by local citizens. (Photo/CGTN)
People living in Nanjing, a city in China's Jiangsu Province, have handed in about 80,000 bricks over the past year to help the local government restore the ancient city wall, reported Xinhua News on Monday.
It was a positive sign from the "every brick to the warehouse and guard for City Wall" program launched in November last year, which rewarded citizens who provided information with cash.
The reclaiming campaign was initiated by four protection organizations, with the urgent need to return bricks which were lost after sections of the city wall had been destroyed.
Because of the lack of knowledge about preservation, bricks from parts of the city wall were regarded as construction waste to be disposed of, or in some cases buried. Some bricks became collectors items. Some were unknowingly used to build houses by local residents.
"The property rights of the scattered city wall bricks is very clear and they all belong to the state," said the principal of Preservation and Management Center for Nanjing City Wall to the publisher The Paper last year.
Since the start of the campaign, citizens not only came forward with information, but also handed over bricks they had been keeping carefully for years.
The 80,000 bricks collected so far could be used to restore about three kilometers of city wall.
Xia Baohua, a resident of China's Hubei Province, discovered some of the ancient bricks during a visit to the rural areas of Nanjing's Jiangning District. The bricks were being used as part of a wall for a pigsty.
Xia ended up buying 28 blocks of the bricks and kept them for more than a decade. When he saw a promotion about the reclaiming program in the newspaper, Xia brought his collection to Nanjing and donated them all.
"City wall bricks are valuable only when they are on the city wall," said Qin Chang'an, another donor who handed in 30 bricks, to Xinhua News earlier this year.
The construction of the Nanjing City Wall started in 1366 and was completed in 1393. Some 350 million bricks had been laid by 280,000 workers from 152 counties in five provinces. Each brick had the place it came from stamped on it, the overseer's name, the brickmaker's name and sometimes the date.
"It's wiser to retrace and protect original historical relics than to spend a huge amount of money on building replicas," said netizens on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.
"Asking residents for help in collecting the bricks not only alleviates the brick shortage problem but improves people's awareness of the situation," said Xu Jinwan, chairman of the Nanjing Ancient City Wall Protection Foundation.
