Patrols to halt removal of immovable relics

A thousand patrol inspectors will be hired to protect 2,826 immovable cultural relics in Beijing, announced the municipal cultural heritage bureau.

The bureau launched a project aimed at protecting these sites, which will involve labeling them and hiring about 1,000 "cultural heritage supervisors," according to a People's Daily report yesterday.

The supervisors will be selected from people who are enthusiastic about heritage protection, and they will patrol to "discover on time, and then correct the behavior which is damaging to cultural relics," the report said.

The figure of 2,826 sites refers to immovable cultural relics that have not been listed as heritage protection units, but were registered through a third national cultural relics survey, called for by the State Council, and carried out in December.

They are distributed over the 16 districts and counties of the city, with Mentougou district having the most, 447 sites.

According to the report released by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage in December after the survey, over 44,000 immovable cultural relics in the country have disappeared.

There were 536,001 newly registered relics, but over 26 percent of them are poorly protected, the survey found.

The former residence of a renowned Chinese architect couple, Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, was listed as a cultural relic in the survey, but was still controversially demolished during the past Spring Festival.

"It takes a lot more than just hiring inspectors for cultural relics to survive," said Liu Zheng, a member of the China Cultural Relics Association.

"There are also cultural relics scattered in the wild, like the engraved stones from tombs, which are in danger of being sold illegally," Liu said.

"The administration should come up with detailed policies stipulating what the inspectors are entitled to do when they see illegal behavior," Liu said.

"The inspectors should have enough basic knowledge about heritage protection, and live close by so they can make strict inspections," he noted.