Fact attack! Where we pull a snippet of often-overlooked historical interestingness out of the void and into the present day. So now you know.
In the late 1880s, a French missionary named Abbe Larrieu made great waves in the press after he returned from China with the news that the Great Wall was just an elaborate Chinese lie - it did not exist, and never had.
The theory was able to get quite a bit of traction in the press and pop culture at the time - very few westerners had ever been to China, and many were accustomed to accepting as fact anything said by a person who had been there.
Larrieu wasn't asserting simply that the "Great Wall" was actually a combination of smaller walls, or that it was largely deteriorated, or that it couldn't be seen from space - he was saying that no big walled structures stood in northern China.
"A Chinese Emperor undoubtedly did conceive the idea of a great wall from the Gulf of Liao-Long on the east to Kan-Su on the west," wrote Larrieu. "[But] the only part of the scheme of the Great Wall carried out was the construction [of] scattered towers [but] these were never joined together by any wall. [The] rest never went beyond the brain that conceived it; it was never more than a fancy, and now a myth."
The New York Times covered his confused revelations, saying "This huge Chinese wall, says Abbe Larieu, is a huge Chinese lie."
The Times then noted that "The alleged Great Wall is a favorite excursion for Europeans visiting Pekin, and such a question as whether it exists at all or not should be an easy one to settle definitely."
And easy it was. Larrieu was promptly buried under the 19th-century equivalent of horrible internet comments, in which papers throughout the world published harsh rebuttals of the missionary's claims.
"Perhaps the Abbe Larieu, who declares the Great Wall a myth, saw only [the watch] towers, and did not lift his eyes to the mountain tops," wrote one commenter. "Or he may have ridden through the Pass in a mule litter [a type of mule-carried sedan], the windows of which are too low to give one a sight of the mountains. Or M. Larrieu may have been too absorbed in reading a book. But how can he affirm from what he has not seen, that which many others have seen is a lie and a myth?"
Larrieu's original pamphlet, published in French and titled The Great Wall of China - It is proved that this wall as it is commonly described does not exist, and has never existed, is available online for anyone who wants a particularly horrible China travel guide.
Poor Abbe Larieu - the man who goes down in history as having visited the Great Wall and was too absorbed in his book to realize that it existed.
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