A Coal Company Cut an 18-Metre Hole in the Ming Great Wall to Save Transport Costs
A Shanxi coal firm spent years carving a shortcut through a rammed-earth section of the Ming Great Wall, then backfilled most of it to hide the damage. Four people now face criminal measures — and officials are investigating why nearly a decade of complaints went nowhere.
The gap in the wall at Ningwu county, in northern Shanxi, is about six metres wide today — wide enough to roll a loaded coal truck through. It is all that remains of an 18-metre breach cut into a rammed-earth stretch of the Ming Great Wall, begun in 2007 by a local coal company that wanted a shortcut for hauling slag and a cheaper route than the road around it.
A CCTV investigation broadcast on September 21 filled in the details: the operator, Shenda Chaokai Coal, later backfilled nearly 12 metres of its own breach to conceal the damage, leaving the six-metre gap. Before 2013, the company had no business licence and no mining permit at all — every tonne it moved was illegal. Whistleblowers, some reporting under their real names, began calling out the destruction in 2015; for years, nothing happened.
The response eventually came in stages. County authorities launched a rectification campaign on March 18; by May the company had been ordered to suspend production, and four people were placed under criminal compulsory measures on suspicion of illegal mining and damaging cultural relics. On September 22, a day after the broadcast, Ningwu county, under Xinzhou prefecture, issued a fresh notification acknowledging "long-term weak supervision" by the departments responsible, pledging to investigate "problems over the years", and pointing to emergency repairs on the damaged section, ecological restoration and a new long-term protection mechanism.
The Zhihu question the notification set off — that a coal firm "cut the Ming Great Wall in half at the waist to take a shortcut" — trended at No. 11 on the platform's hot list, its title doing the work of a verdict.
The wall in this part of Shanxi is not the restored stone of Badaling but rammed earth and tamped loess, which a bulldozer can bite through in an afternoon. The Great Wall has been protected by national regulation since 2006, with grading, fencing and patrol duties devolved to counties — and that is where the system failed here: the case became national news only when CCTV's cameras arrived, nearly a decade after the first real-name reports.
What Ningwu has now promised is an accounting of those years: why reports dating to 2015 never stopped a company that, the investigation found, held no licence until 2013. The six-metre gap is being repaired. The open question is who, beyond the four people already charged, answers for the years when the reports changed nothing.