William Lindesay OBE was a Keynote Speaker at The Asian Conference on Media, Communication & Film 2017, and delivered a presentation on the Great Wall of China, a subject on which he is considered the world’s preeminent expert. A cultural geographer, historian and conservationist, as well as author and filmmaker, Mr Lindesay spoke of the importance of our shared cultural and archaeological heritage, and the importance of both understanding and conserving local, national and world heritage sites.
One of the streams of the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative looks at such global great heritage sites as part of the global patrimony, and yet such historical sites can easily fall victim to neglect or vandalism, or damage through war and terrorism. Although now protected to a far greater extent by the Chinese government, and largely thanks to the work of William Lindesay, parallels were drawn between the Great Wall, and other threatened heritage sites, such as Mes Aynak in Afghanistan, which was the subject of Brent Huffman’s Saving Mes Aynak, winner of the IAFOR Documentary Film Award Honorary Award for 2015.