Lei Xiangping

    lagon235@163.com

    ON Jan. 3, while people were enjoying the New Year holiday, Gongchen Tower, an ancient city gate with a history of more than 600 years, was destroyed by a fire in Weishan County, Yunnan Province. It is indeed lamentable, not least for the fact that the province listed the tower as a cultural heritage site.

    As the landmark building of Weishan Ancient City, the tower, which dated back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), shaped a beautiful collective memory for the local people: The tower used to be a vantage point for locals to take in a full view of the city and snowy scenes of famous Cang Mountain, 70 kilometers away.

    What caused the fire? The investigation by local authorities blamed electrical equipment malfunction. However, local people pointed fingers at officials who leased the tower for commercial development. According to regulations, as a heritage site, the tower should not have been leased to a commercial teahouse.

    Yang Fuquan, a culture expert at the Chinese Institute of Social Science, opined that the local government paid more attention to the tower’s commercial development than to protecting it because the teahouse greatly increased the risk of fire.

    The latest report by Yunnan Daily seemed to support Yang’s point. Four years ago, the local heritage administration had a fire risk assessment report done, which mentioned the deficiency of firefighting devices and the potential risks of commercial development within the tower. However, it was not taken seriously, and no improvements had been made.

    Many ancient relics around China have survived for centuries only to be destroyed through neglect. Last year, a 600-year-old Miao ethnic village and a 300-year-old Dong village in Guizhou Province were both damaged by fires. The Miao village was in the process of applying for UNESCO recognition as a world cultural heritage; In Shangri-La in Yunnan Province, a fire turned the 1,300-year ancient city of Dukezong, the biggest Tibet-style village in China, to ashes and incurred an economic loss over 100 million yuan (US$16.18 million). These ancient cities have one thing in common: They were overdeveloped commercially while underequipped for fire prevention and fighting.

    According the State Administration of Culture Heritage, there have been over 1,300 fires in various ancient cities between 2009 and 2014, 40 percent of which were caused by household misuses of fire, 20 percent by electrical equipment malfunctions and the rest by arson, playing with fire, smoking and lightning strikes. Obviously, these fires are mostly the result of human activities, both intentional and unintentional.

    As more ancient cities are developed for tourism and commercial purposes, the increase in human activities has threatened the cities’ safety. In the pursuit of profit, many developers have added modern facilities to ancient cities, some even rearranging previous structures in order to create more rentable spaces, which not only has changed their unique features, but also buried seeds of future risk. Like in Weishan, bars, shops, restaurants, travel agencies and residential houses are crowded into small spaces, and modern facilities in these units have led to a surge in power consumption, overburdening ageing wires and easily leading to electrical fires. Worse still, little room for fireproofing devices is reserved and few fire buffer zones are built. No wonder the Gongchen Tower was so vulnerable to fire.

    Every fire serves as a painful lesson that fire prevention and fighting should be a priority and fire rules should be implemented strictly. Every ancient town is a unique gem of Chinese culture that we cannot afford to lose.

    (The author is an editor with the News Desk at China Radio International.)