Word: parthenon
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...tourist is prepared for the pyramids or the Parthenon. But the Great Wall of China? More than 2,480 mortised miles of esplanade, built over the bodies of 300,000 serfs and some of the world's ruggedest mountain terrain, to no ultimate military purpose. On a windswept turret of the wall completed in 214 B.C., in a 500-year-old pavilion of the Forbidden City or Soochow's leaning Tiger Hill Pagoda (it has a 3¾° tilt), the visitor is not so much awed as numbed. Who were-and are - the people who could construct...
...crew of 1,000, it makes Versailles look like a nouveau riche country mansion. In the hills northwest of the city is the Summer Palace, which was largely destroyed hi 1860 by Britain's Lord Elgin, son of the seigneur who took the marbles from the Parthenon. Rebuilt hi 1888 by the dotty Dowager Empress Tz'u Hsi, diverting funds allotted for naval construction, the imperial plaisanterie occupies 700 acres and attracts huge numbers of Chinese rubbernecks. And then there are the Ming Tombs and, a few hours away, the Great Wall. Otherwise the city is nondescript...
...Parthenon...
Lord Kenneth Clark, narrator of TV's Civilisation: "I still go to Chartres cathedral each year and to the Parthenon every three years. Very good. Keeps your standards high...
...plan is to remove all the remaining sculpture and install it in a yet unbuilt museum at the base of the Acropolis. The bare patches will be filled with fiber-glass replicas, made by the British Museum-which, thanks to Lord Elgin, already has the better part of the Parthenon's original friezes. As for the stones, the rusty iron clamps and rods will have to be extracted and replaced in what one UNESCO expert calls "a gigantic root-canal job." Finally there is the problem of mass tourism-3 million visitors a year shepherded round the Acropolis...