Exploding Tourism Eroding China’s Riches

For the growing army of middle-class Chinese with a little extra money to spend, touring their vast country has become almost as natural as breathing. Both activities, it turns out, are harming the ancient Buddhist grottoes that make this place one of China’s cultural wonders.

Carved directly into a cliff face in the Gobi Desert, the Mogao caves contain a millennium’s worth of work by travelers along the old Silk Road who turned countless small caves into stunningly painted shrines between the 4th and 14th centuries.

Wind, rain, sand and Western plunderers have all damaged the caves over the years. But the greatest scourge these days comes from the tourists who swarm here by the busload, bringing destructive amounts of carbon dioxide and moisture into the caves along with their eagerness for a glimpse of ages past.

“If I didn’t get to see this before I died, it would have been the greatest regret of my life,” said Liu Rui, 57, a retiree who made the journey from Shanghai, hundreds of miles away. “They should let as many people see it as possible.”

It’s a nice sentiment, but totally insupportable if the art inside the 492 grottoes is to survive. Many of the murals are already sagging or peeling from the earthen walls, their delicate beauty faded away. Others have deteriorated beyond the repair efforts of Chinese and foreign experts, including workers from the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.

The plight of the Mogao caves is a familiar one in China, where the breakneck rush toward freer markets and greater openness has resulted in an explosion of tourism and a corresponding erosion of some of the world’s most precious cultural monuments, from the terra-cotta warriors in Xian to the mighty Great Wall itself.

After 20 years of economic reforms, the Chinese government is waking up to the need to preserve the nation’s heritage in a systematic, comprehensive way before the sites themselves--and the revenue they rake in--disappear altogether.

“Asia’s share of tourism growth is the fastest-growing in the world, and the lion’s share is in China,” said Richard Engelhardt, a regional advisor for the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, known as UNESCO.

“Unless we take some measures, we may be in danger of loving our heritage to death,” Engelhardt told a conference on cultural conservation in Beijing last month.

Although the Communist regime recognizes the challenge, tackling it has turned out to be a relatively slow and haphazard business.

At the root of the problem is money. As a poor nation, China has few resources left over for cultural conservation after struggling to overhaul its command economy, dampen rising unemployment, take care of an aging population, put in infrastructure and modernize its massive military.

At the same time, precisely because the nation is so poor, local officials have increasingly turned to tourism as a cash cow, often exploiting cultural and natural sites to their limit and threatening sites of inestimable value.

In the scenic southern city of Guilin, for example, so many tour boats ply the adjacent river that their churning wake has worn away sculptures erected along the waterway’s banks hundreds of years ago.

But the material benefits of tourism for local residents are hard to overstate, especially for people long mired in poverty and desperate for a way out.

Here in Dunhuang--in Gansu province, one of China’s poorest areas--tourist receipts account for a whopping one-third of the revenue for the entire province, officials say.

The city is home to two four-star hotels opened in the last five years, a number of other smaller establishments and its own new airport. The latter has eliminated the need to drive hours across inhospitable terrain to reach the site, which helped keep tourist numbers down. Now, souvenir stalls line Dunhuang’s sidewalks, all selling the same things, from stuffed animals to tacky jewelry to colorful batik prints.

About 300,000 visitors a year, nearly all of them in the summer, converge on this oasis town, which essentially exists to serve the Mogao grottoes.

It all adds up to a headache for Fan Jinshi, director of the Dunhuang Academy, who is under constant pressure to grant more tourist access even as she oversees the protection of the caves on a bare-bones budget funded by ticket receipts and the state.

“Preservation is No. 1,” she said. “You can’t enjoy what’s not there.”

Authorities have tried to lessen tourism’s negative effects by rotating and limiting the number of caves open to the public--only about 20 to 30 at a time--and prohibiting photography.

Visitors must be accompanied by guides inside the darkened grottoes, which contain astonishingly beautiful paintings of paradise, apsaras (angels) and the patrons who commissioned the various caves.

In one cavern sits a Buddha more than 100 feet tall, in the same serene pose of blessing as when it was installed during the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-906). Other caves are cramped spaces barely large enough to hold a few people at a time. The earliest grotto dates from the 4th century.

“You can’t have a site like that that’s open carte-blanche to tourists. They have to be guided and supervised,” said Neville Agnew of the Getty Conservation Institute.

The Getty has been involved in preservation programs at Dunhuang since 1989 and received an award just this month from the Chinese government for its contributions.

Its original work centered on reducing sand and wind erosion and monitoring the environment inside the caves, including changes in humidity, temperature and carbon dioxide levels. Conservators are now concentrating on rescuing Cave 85, another Tang Dynasty grotto, to serve as a model for future restoration.

“Tourism and conservation should be good partners,” Agnew said. “The problem is . . . that connection hasn’t been made in the mind of the tourist authorities. . . . The political heads have often not seen that a tourist site is often a nonrenewable resource, like Mogao.”

Agnew said he was shocked last year when he visited Taishan, one of China’s major religious sites, and discovered “cable cars and junk and crass commercialism and so on. That’s the most sacred mountain in China.”

Similarly, at the Great Wall outside Beijing, tourists can mount the wall on cable cars, then whoosh back down on toboggan slides.

Fierce competition for tourist dollars, which in China (including Hong Kong) equaled $21.1 billion last year, has accelerated the degradation of cultural monuments.

In Lijiang, a postcard-pretty mountain village in Yunnan province, greed risks destroying some of the very beauty and ethnic flavor that tourists come to experience.

Near the city, rushing waters thunder through the Tiger Leaping Gorge, a favored destination of hikers and backpackers. For those who prefer convenience and comfort, however, a road has been carved along one side of the gorge to make way for cars and buses.

Not to be left out of the tourist boom, local officials on the other side of the river are blasting their own road through the gorge, to the dismay of those who want to keep the area as pristine as possible.

“To build a highway on the other side of the river may not seem in tune with the natural beauty, but it brings visitors convenience and safety,” said Yao Ruixiong, director of Lijiang’s preservation bureau. “If not for that highway, travelers would have to walk a long way and climb hills to enjoy the scenery”--which for many hikers is precisely the point.

In the town of Lijiang itself, a UNESCO World Heritage site famed for its snowcapped peaks and classic Chinese architecture, souvenir shops have proliferated in the Old City, as have canned performances for tourists that purport to showcase indigenous life.

Lijiang hosted 2.8 million visitors in 1999, and some experts think that’s too many.

“At any given time, visitors may well outnumber local inhabitants,” said Engelhardt, the UNESCO advisor. “When the carrying capacity of a historic site is exceeded, it is impossible to maintain its conservation up to expected World Heritage standards.”

But Yao wants even more tourists--up to 10 million, if they’ll come.

“Yes, the increasing number of tourists has affected the Old City, but we have to keep our door open to every tourist,” he said. “Economic development here depends on it.”