A cultural heritage official yesterday rejected some Chinese
media reports that six of the country's World Heritage sites were
considered being put on an endangered list.
The sites mentioned in the reports are: the Forbidden City, the
Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace in Beijing; the Potala
Palace in Lhasa of the Tibet Autonomous Region; as well as the
Three Parallel Rivers and the Old Town of Lijiang in Yunnan
Province.
Roni Amelan, a press officer with United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters in
Paris, also said that reports about the six sites were "not
correct" and that the purpose of the World Heritage in Danger list
is to garner support for better conservation.
However, Guo Zhan, an official at the State Administration of
Cultural Heritage and vice-chairman of the International Council on
Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), told China Daily that an
international team will be sent to the two sites in Yunnan to check
their conservation status.
Members will come from the World Heritage Center of the
UNESCO.?
The decision was made by the UNESCO's World Heritage Committee
during its annual convention in Christchurch, New Zealand on
Wednesday.
The two sites in Yunnan are to be investigated because some
committee members believe that the proposed dams, and mines being
dug, near the Three Parallel Rivers (Nujiang, Lancang and Yangtze
riviers) would jeopardize the site, and that Lijiang is being too
commercialized, said Guo.
A report in Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post yesterday
quoted a Chinese representative at the convention as saying that
some delegates were dissatisfied with the ongoing facelift of the
three sites in Beijing and about the landscape around the
Potala.
It added that all the six sites will have to answer queries at
the meeting, and if they fail to give satisfactory answers, they
are likely to be put on the list of World Heritage in Danger.
An official at the Summer Palace administrative office, who did
not want to be named, told China Daily that only traditional
materials were used, and national standards followed, during the
renovation of the Forbidden City.
An official at the Beijing Municipal Cultural Heritage
Administration said that experts from the UNESCO committee
inspected the three sites in the capital last month and praised
their conservation status as "very good".
So it is "impossible" for the three sites to be put on the
endangered list, he added.
Also at the New Zealand convention on Wednesday, the committee
inscribed the Kaiping Diaolou and Villages on UNESCO's World
Cultural Heritage List, and South China's Karst region of stone
forests on the World Natural Heritage List. This brings the total
of World Heritage sites in China to 35.
The Kaiping Diaolou and Villages feature multi-storied defensive
village houses in Kaiping of Guangdong Province, which display a
flamboyant fusion of Chinese, South Asian, Australian and North
American architectural forms in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.
(China Daily June 29, 2007)