On June 25, 1899 four Denver newspapers reported that the Chinese government was going to tear down portions of the Great Wall of China, pulverize the rock, and use it to build roads. Frank C. Lewis, a representative of a syndicate of Chicago capitalists, was credited as the source of this information. He had supposedly shared the news with reporters in Denver while en route to China to bid on completing the demolition project.

Within days newspapers throughout the country picked up the story -- which they regretted when it became apparent that the news was not true. The Chinese were not planning to tear down the Great Wall.

Eventually the full details of the hoax were revealed. Four Denver reporters -- Al Stevens, Jack Tournay, John Lewis, and Hal Wilshire -- had invented the tale while sharing a drink at the Oxford Hotel in order to spice up a slow news day.

The entire incident might have been remembered as nothing more than a minor media hoax. Newspapers during this period in American history were full of invented stories. However, the punchline of this hoax was still to come.

Decades later a rumor began to circulate suggesting that when the news reached China, the Chinese had become so furious at the idea of Americans tearing down the Great Wall, that they took up arms against Westerners in retaliation. This, the rumor claimed, was the cause of the Boxer Rebellion.

The tale of how a hoax started the Boxer Rebellion proved especially popular with preachers, who to this day continue to use it as a morality tale to demonstrate the "power of the tongue" -- or how "your mouth gets you in trouble." However, there is no evidence that the rumor is true. The 1899 hoax does not appear to have had any influence on events in China.


The only source of information about the creation of the hoax is an article published by the Denver-based songwriter Harry Lee Wilber in 1939. Wilber is not an entirely credible source (as will subsequently be shown). However, there is no reason to doubt the general facts he provides about the origin of the hoax.

According to Wilber, the idea for the hoax started when four reporters from the major Denver papers (the Republican, the Denver Times, the Denver Post, and the Rocky Mountain News) met by chance at the train station on a "bleak Saturday night." They had each been assigned to cover the downtown station and hotels, but confessed to each other that they had no story for the Sunday edition.

Al Stevens declared that he was going to invent something. The other three agreed they would too.

The four men walked over to the bar at the Oxford Hotel, where they hatched their plan. Instead of inventing four separate stories, they decided to conspire to create one big one.

They brainstormed ideas: perhaps a Wall Street firm planning to build a steel mill to compete with the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, or the kidnapping of a rich debutante. Too fantastic, they decided. One of them noted that a foreign story would be more difficult to debunk, so they began thinking of which country to locate their story in: Russia, Germany, Spain, Holland, Japan? Then it came to them in a flash. China would be perfect!

Wilber writes:



And so they came up with the story of an American businessman en route to China to bid on the demolition of the Great Wall. To bolster the credibility of their story, they walked over to the Windsor Hotel where they convinced the clerk to record in the register that a party of engineers had stayed there.

Finally, the reporters made a pact that they would tell no one of their scheme "during their lifetime." Then they each went their separate way to write up the story for the next day's news.


It has not been possible to access archival copies of the Denver newspapers. However, on June 26, 1899 the Chicago Daily Tribune printed what appears to be the verbatim text of the Denver hoax: