The Great Wall among the New Seven Wonders
It is now official: The Great Wall has been chosen as one of the new Seven Wonders of the World in an unprecedented global vote that drew nearly 100 million internet and telephone voters. In fact it received the most votes among the 21 finalist sites (not very surprising as China has one of the biggest internet populations?). Other sites that have been recognised as new wonders include:
- Petra, Jordan
- The statue of Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro
- The Incan ruins of Machu Picchu, Peru
- The Mayan city of Chichen Itza, Mexico
- The Coliseum, Rome
- The Taj Mahal, India
The 14 sites that did not make it were:
- The Acropolis, Greece
- Alhambra, Spain
- Angkor, Cambodia
- Statues of Easter Island, Chile
- Eiffel Tower, France
- Hagia Sophia, Turkey
- Kiyomizu Temple, Japan
- Kremlin/St. Basil, Russia
- Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany
- Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
- Statue of Liberty, USA
- Stonehenge, United Kingdom
- Sydney Opera House, Australia
- Timbuktu, Mali
Only one of the original seven wonders, the Pyramids of Egypt, can still be seen. The others were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Unfortunately, the Pyramids were not selected among the new Seven Wonders but they have been given honorary status after an Egyptian official complained that it was undignified that the pyramids had to compete in an online poll.
Backers of the competition believe that the selection of the wonders would be better put to a vote rather than by an arbitrary panel of experts. However, there was no foolproof way of preventing people from voting more than once for their favourite wonder. Already, UNESCO has slammed the new seven wonders list. Comments by various UNESCO spokespeople include the following:
This campaign responds to other criteria and objectives than that of UNESCO in the field of heritage. We have a much broader vision.[The New Seven Wonders sends out a]... negative message to countries whose sites have not been retained. All of these wonders obviously deserve a place on the list, but what disturbs us is that the list is limited to just seven. Seven were adequate in antiquity because the antique world was much smaller than today.