Beijing: About 160 historical sites, including the Peking Man World Heritage Site at Zhoukoudian, were damaged in floods caused by the heaviest rainfall in six decades in Beijing and suburbs. The floods also caused an economic losses of about USD 125 million, Beijing Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage said.
The deluge caused several small-scale landslides at the Peking Man site and disabled its security system, Li Yan, senior administrator at Zhoukoudian, located in a village 50 kilometers southwest of Beijing said. A museum at the site was flooded, but the major exhibits are all safe. Dirt and mud washed by the heaviest rainfall in six decades covered part of the archaeological dig at Zhoukoudian and halted researchers’ work for at least three days, said Zhang Shuangquan, an archaeologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Zhoukoudian’s administrators covered the site with plastic sheets two years ago, but Zhang said the protection would be ineffective unless the whole mountain top were covered, because rain slowly permeates rocks, making the stratum fragile. Zhoukoudian has already contacted experts at Beijing’s cultural heritage administration about drafting a protection plan, but there is no timeline for the project. “We improved our fences and buildings in 2006, and thanks to that, we didn’t have serious damage in this flood,” Li said. The security system is working again and the site is still open to the public, he said. Only a couple of sightseeing spots are closed because of safety concerns.
Discovered by the Swedish archaeologist Johan Gunnar Andersson in 1918, Zhoukoudian has yielded many archaeological breakthroughs, including one of the first specimens of Homo erectus, dubbed Peking Man. In 1987, the UNESCO named it a World Heritage Site. The 1,400-year-old Yunju Temple, another historical site in Beijing’s hard-hit Fangshan district, was also damaged by the deluge. (PTI)