China, 2012

It is (or was) an urban myth that one can see the Great Wall from space. While there are more than 13,000 miles of walls (it’s actually not one wall but a scattering of many in various regions), they don’t create a large mass.

Last week’s post was from a less frequently visited Wall area, and didn’t show much Wall. This photograph is from about three hours northeast of Beijing in a more tourism-prepped area, an area with some long, connecting Wall sections snaking along the landscape.

Seeing and walking on the Wall, it’s impossible to not be impressed by the audacity of the idea, the engineering, and the physical accomplishment, tempering that with the understanding that, like the pyramids of Egypt and Central America, or the Roman aqueducts, or the Taj Mahal, or Monticello or Mount Vernon, thousands of slaves labored and died over centuries in the execution of the plan.

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