In a poem by Robert Frost entitled Mending Walls, the speaker of the poem discusses the walls that separate him from his neighbor, both physically and psychologically. The Great Wall of China is one of the most impressive man-made structures ever built. Like the speaker in Frost’s poem, the Chinese nation built the wall to protect itself physically and to impact the psychological perceptions of its enemies upon viewing the enormous structure making China a virtual fortress. When considering the size and scope of the Great Wall, one must remember that China is larger in area than the United States and it contains four times as many inhabitants. The Great Wall’s size is of such enormity that it is the only man-made structure observable from space and “is made up of between 2,500 and 3,000 miles of fortifications…never completely surveyed” (Roberts 31).
The Great Wall was built over a period of thousands of years and is actually a series of walls that were constructed originally to help protect various regions of the nation, “Although the original Great Wall was built at the end of the 3rd century BCE, the wall sections that are still standing mainly date back to the Ming Dynasty (14th- to 17th century CE)” (Roberts 30). Much more than the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam or other major man-made construction projects in history, the Great Wall represents one of the most on-going and enormous public works building projects in history. The Wall spans more than 1,850 miles and separates Eastern China from the Himalayas (Radar 1). What is most remarkable about the Wall is that there are many portions of it which have been covered by centuries of desert sands but new technology is helping uncover portions of the Wall that have remained a mystery to modern archeologists and historians. Radar technology is helping locate buried segments of the Wall of great interest to experts in many disciplines from history and archeology...