Shortlisted
The Renaissance of the Great Wall
Alex Won
t was the year 3093, and the Great Wall of China was standing tall and majestic. However, it wasn't going
to stay that way for long because the world was on the verge of World War III. Yang, a young boy of the
age of 9, stood on the Great Wall and thought about all the times he had played with his friends on this wall.
The wall symbolised his home, his childhood, fun and joy. It was the whole entire world to him. To his
country, the Great Wall symbolised unity, strength, cultural importance and history.
g, Group 2: Fiction, Victoria Shanghai Academy
I
Suddenly, Yang's mother came rushing to the wall and said “We have been selected to go to the evacuation
rocket! We must leave immediately! Grab one thing you love and let's get going!” Impulsively, Yang broke off
one of the bricks of the Great Wall, and dashed home to meet his parents. Together they hopped on to a
hovercraft to go to the local rocket launch site.
Since China's first manned space craft launch in 2003, the nation's space program has developed
tremendously. The first Chinese space station was built in 2020 and now, more than a thousand years later, it
has expanded into a city-like complex attached to the moon. The government sent a mother ship with lots of
docking ports, and over the years, they sent up baby ships with 2 to 3 docking ports to form the space station.
The lunar city has a protective bubble around it and some artificial gravity and atmosphere generators. The
bubble can expand so that more people can live in it. The Chinese government built this lunar city in
anticipation of World War III. The Chinese space station now has enough room for up to 5 million people to live
in. 100 people already live on the lunar city.
World War III will be a nuclear war, so a lot of places will be bombed - one of which is likely to be China
because it is a major superpower. The radiation from the bombs will affect the ability to sustain life in many
places, especially the bomb sites. The space evacuation program is aiming to preserve the ways of the Chinese
culture and history, while including the basic needs of the people displaced by the war. The colony needed the
specialists who are necessary for survival. They include farmers, scientists, technicians and doctors.
Yang, his family and his village were all farmers, so they were chosen as a representative of his region's
culture and because they knew how to farm. The plan of the evacuation is to get some of the population and
culture of each region to evacuate.
Life on the lunar city was hard at first because Yang and his family had few possessions. But soon they got
used to the life there. Yang felt comfortable in the lunar city because his family and friends were with him.
Many years passed, and with them, Yang grew up and became an inventor. He had not forgotten his
childhood ambition to restore the Great Wall. He could still identify some parts of the Great Wall from the
moon. So, he did extensive research about the history and construction of the Great Wall, sometimes not even
sleeping. He met a team of skilled construction workers, builders, programmers and architects who were his
friends on the lunar city and showed them his research. He built a fleet of work robots that his friends
programmed to solve the problem of not having enough workers. However, the biggest problem he had to
overcome was the shortage of building materials. He simply couldn't find a suitable substitute for the original
stones of the Great Wall.
One of his greatest inventions was a 3 Dimensional cloner. But he didn't know what to clone in order to
achieve successful restoration of the Great Wall.
One day, when he was cleaning his house, he discovered the brick, that he had taken as a souvenir. He had
forgotten all about it! He put the brick into the 3 Dimensional cloner and pressed the copy button, enlarged it,
waited and it...worked! So, brick by brick, Yang and his friends recreated the Great Wall of China on the moon.
One Millennium later, when Earth was inhabitable again, one of Yang's descendants who was exploring
earth looked up at the moon and saw that there was a long snaky line across the moon. It was the only structure
on the moon that was visible from Earth - the new Great Wall of China!
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