Three Arrested After Badaling Great Wall is Defiled... Again

It appears Badaling just can't catch a break. In what has become almost an annual event, the popular portion of the Great Wall is back in the news this week after three tourists were caught defiling it with a metal object.

A video of the incident, which occurred at around 1pm on Sunday, captures how two women eye up the favored spot before their male companion gets to work nonchalantly scratching his name into the brickwork.

Yanqing police announced on Monday that the tourists had been detained and fined by early Monday morning.

Experts quoted by one online report said that repairing the bricks is particularly difficult because scrubbing them further destroys the stone whereas covering them would mean adversely affecting the style of the wall.

Despite being considered a "national cultural relic protection site," Badaling is no stranger to wayward tourists wanting to carve their name into the annals of history. Just last summer, following a separate graffiti incident, the Yanqing District Culture and Tourism Bureau announced the launch of a visitor blacklist to restrict anyone caught vandalizing the wall from being able to visit it and Yanqing's 12 other scenic spots for an allotted period of time.

Since the rollout of the measures in April 2020, several tourists have been fined or put into administrative detention, according to the Global Times.

According to Chinese law, defilement or damage of cultural relics in places of historic interests can result in warnings or fines of up to RMB 200. In more serious cases, offenders may be detained for five to 10 days and fined between RMB 200-500.

It's not just domestic tourists who have found themselves in trouble after damaging the wall. In one particularly high-profile incident, NBA basketball player Bobby Brown was lambasted online after he visited Badaling in 2016, leaving his name scrawled on the top of the wall. In a post after images of his signature went viral, Brown said it was an "honest mistake."

Apparently, for many, the threat of infamy and fines may not be enough as defacement of the wall continues to be a problem, and from the amount of graffiti that can be seen surrounding the scribbling in this latest incident, it's clear that for every person who is caught there are far more who go unpunished.

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Images: SCMP, Pinterest, Weibo