# China's First Spaceman Breaks the Great Wall Fallacy
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977
**Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
**Created:** [January 18, 2008, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977 "2008-01-18T04:08:13Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@versili](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/versili)
#### Post date: [January 18, 2008, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977/1 "2008-01-18T04:08:13Z")
> [@](#):
>
> Elementary school teacher Xiao Chunlan is puzzled by a sudden jolt to her long-held belief that she thought was as rock solid as the Great Wall.
>
> Namely, the Great Wall is one of only two man-made structures that astronauts can see from space with their naked eyes (the other being reclamation projects in Amsterdam, the Netherlands).
>
> …
>
> That is, until Yang Liwei made the historic journey to outer space.
>
> A reporter asked him afterwards: “Could you see the Great Wall from out there?”
>
> Yang responded without hesitation: “No.”
🙂🙂🙂
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### Author:  [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)
#### Post date: [January 18, 2008, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977/2 "2008-01-18T04:51:40Z")
Put 'em up against the wall.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [January 18, 2008, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977/3 "2008-01-18T05:32:12Z")
As a guest, **versili** can’t search, though it would have been nice to link to Cecil’s original and undated [column](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_092.html).
This isn’t exactly breaking news. Yang Liwei’s flight was on October 15, 2003.
Since that times, there have been several threads commenting on his comment.
[Great Wall of China – not visible from space…](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=244718)
[Shenzhou in Space](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=339561).
[The Great Wall: China’s best kept secret?](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=408622)
Two of these were also started by guests, oddly.
Even the [Imagethief blog: Public relations, communication and interesting times in China](http://news.imagethief.com/blogs/china/archive/2006/04/04/6339.aspx) had somebody cite the Cecil column, as did the hardcore nerds at [TriviaHallOfFame.com](http://www.triviahalloffame.com/greatwall.htm).
Nothing ever goes away on the Internet.
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### Author:  [@bibliophage](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bibliophage)
#### Post date: [January 18, 2008, 12:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977/4 "2008-01-18T12:49:45Z")
Welcome to the SDMB, versili.
We’re hypervigilant about copyright issues here at the SDMB, so I’ve edited your post to reduce the amount of text. In the future, please do not simply cut and paste whole articles from other websites. Limit quotations to a few sentences at most, and provide a link to the rest. The rest of your article can be read at [http://spanish.china.org.cn/english/scitech/80887.htm](http://spanish.china.org.cn/english/scitech/80887.htm)
bibliophage
moderator CCC
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### Author:  [@Keeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Keeve)
#### Post date: [January 18, 2008, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977/5 "2008-01-18T17:32:10Z")
According to [Snopes](http://www.snopes.com/science/greatwall.asp) it is true that the Great Wall is not visible from up there, but _a great many other things **are** _.
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### Author:  [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)
#### Post date: [January 18, 2008, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977/6 "2008-01-18T17:53:54Z")
My penis, for example.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [January 18, 2008, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977/7 "2008-01-18T19:42:07Z")
[QUOTE=Keeve]
According to [Snopes](http://www.snopes.com/science/greatwall.asp) it is true that the Great Wall is not visible from up there, but _a great many other things **are** _.
[/QUOTE]
A link to Snopes is given in two of the threads I linked to above.
Snopes also says that the first mention of the legend was from Richard Halliburton in 1938, but I gave a link to Wiki that mentions a 1932 Ripley’s Believe It or Not cartoon.
Can anyone verify the existence of that cartoon?
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### Author:  [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2008, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977/8 "2008-01-19T04:04:37Z")
A recent news report on that giant palm in Madagascar (or, as a Polish buddy who plays _RISK_ calls it, “Madagaski”) said it was visible from space, not expanding on that to say it was visible in the satellite photos on Google Earth, not with the naked eye. I had to explain to my daughter that it wouldn’t have to be all that big to show up on Google Earth because I could identify our house by the white Tempo parked across the street in early satellite shots. Now that we’ve junked the Tempo it should be real easy to spot our house by the thumb-in-your-eye-yellow Focus my oldest bought to replace it, if she were ever home. On a sunny day I think that car might be visible with the naked eye…from the moon.
When she was looking at it I told her that if she didn’t buy it I would. There are times a guy needs a stupid car and it just needs one of those power chips and a nitrous injector and a blower and a …
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### Author:  [@Angua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Angua)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2008, 11:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977/9 "2008-01-19T11:01:23Z")
**bonzer** ’s away from his home PC at the moment, so has asked me to post this on his behalf:
[QUOTE=bonzer]
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Can anyone verify the existence of that cartoon?
[/QUOTE]
It’s reproduced in the Arthur Waldron book on the Wall that I mentioned in the last of the old threads you linked to.
I emailed the Mikkelsons years ago pointing this reference out and generally drawing their attention to Waldron’s book, but they never seem to have followed up the lead.
[/QUOTE]
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### Author:  [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)
#### Post date: [January 19, 2008, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977/10 "2008-01-19T14:57:42Z")
The Google Maps / Google Earth database isn’t all satellite in the first place; it also includes plain old aerial photography. That’s why some areas are have detailed coverage and others don’t.
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### Author:  [@samclem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samclem)
#### Post date: [January 20, 2008, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/chinas-first-spaceman-breaks-the-great-wall-fallacy/433977/11 "2008-01-20T00:24:12Z")
Using _Google Books_, searching 1920-1930 for [“Visible from the moon” Great Wall], you get [China Review](http://books.google.com/books?id=QLI_AAAAMAAJ&q=%22great+wall%22+visible+moon++date:1920-1930&dq=%22great+wall%22+visible+moon++date:1920-1930&lr=&as_brr=0&pgis=1), 1921, pg. 136, which says, in snippet view
> [@](#):
>
> According to astronomers, the only work of man’s hands which would be visible to the human eye from the moon is the Great Wall of China.
. That’s the earliest I can find.
I should add that I think this popular misconception is a misstatement of what astronomers actually believed, which is that _using telescopes equal to the current best on the Earth_, the Wall would be visible from the Moon.