Time is running out for the Great Wall of China. If someone doesn’t step forward soon, the sucker’s gonna get bulldozed. All three vertical feet of it. (Which Great Wall did you think we were referring to, exactly?)

Lake Mary resident Steven Phillips wants to be the latest owner of the Great Wall replica at the shuttered Splendid China theme park in Kissimmee. The park closed in late 2003, and most of the miniatures have since been auctioned off, including the Great Wall. But the first owner balked when he realized that, though miniature, the 1,800-foot long replica weighs something like 3 million pounds. He wanted a new fence for his yard, but that’s a mofo of a fence. Plus it’s not even tall enough to keep your neighbors from peeping when you’re grilling in the nude, ya know?

So ownership of the wall reverted back to the company that operated Splendid China, and in stepped businessman and Actual Great Wall devotee Phillips, who dreams of hiking the entire length of the real thing someday, and is apparently undaunted by the prospect of carting off a 3-million-pound souvenir. Phillips wants to keep the wall intact and eventually put it on display somewhere. Just to get started he’ll have to come up with $50,000 to cut it into 200 pieces and move it to Lake County for storage.

So far, no one has ponied up the cash. “I’m not wealthy, and I wasn’t able to find someone in the Central Florida area,” he says. So Phillips and a couple friends chipped off 8 percent of the wall to sell on his website (www.greatwallreplica.com) in an effort to raise the necessary yen. Prices for pieces range from $10 for a 10-brick “domino cluster,” to $100 for a crenelated brick cluster. Phillips estimates he’s sold about $4,000 worth of bricks to date.

The original deadline to tear down and move the wall was March 11. If Phillips gets a clear title to the replica, which he says could happen as early as this week, he’ll probably have to move it by mid-May. All the world is watching and wondering if Florida is going to raze yet another piece of its history, says Phillips, so if you ever coveted a miniature piece of a miniature replica of the maximum wall, now’s the time.

“People in China want this replica saved, and they want Americans to save it.”

(from http://www.orlandoweekly.com)

~Alyx