Imperial Roman army other military facilities e.g. Hadrian's Wall itself was built by the army. But they also built up much of a province's Roman infrastructure: trunk Roman roads, bridges, docks, canals, aqueducts, entire new cities such as "coloniae" for veteran legionaries, public buildings (e.g. basilicas and amphitheatres). The army also carried out large-scale projects to increase the land available for agriculture, such as forest clearance and draining marshes (e.g. the large-scale drainage of the Fens in eastern England, which were probably developed as a huge imperial estate). The army also excavated many of the mines and quarries that produced the raw materials
History of the Great Wall of China feature prominently. The French philosopher Voltaire (16941774), for example, frequently wrote about the Great Wall, although his feelings towards it oscillate between unreserved admiration and condemnation of it as a "monument to fear". The Macartney Embassy of 1793 passed through the Great Wall at Gubeikou on the way to see the Qianlong Emperor in Chengde, who was there for the annual imperial hunt. One of the embassy's members, John Barrow, later founder of the Royal Geographical Society, spuriously calculated that the amount of stone in the Wall was equivalent to "all the dwelling houses of England and Scotland" and would