A Hoax, Or a Hoax of a Hoax?

I was planning to put something up today about an incident that is, by lore, one of the immediate precipitating causes of the Boxer Rebellion. To shore up your late-19th Century history, during the Colonial Age most of the European powers went around snapping up land as quickly as they could in Africa and southern Asia. Really the only nations in Asia that had large enough central governments to avoid this and be recognized by the Europeans were China and Japan.

But China didn't hold out very long. At first by acquiescence, and then by brute force, the Europeans basically started taking over coastal Chinese cities as de facto colonies, running trade to and from China from these holdings. This didn't go over too well with the Chinese in general, and in particular, a nationalistic group called the "Fists of Righteous Harmony" (aka the Boxers) started drawing more support and members at a grass roots level.

The Boxers' original plan was to overthrow the Empire and throw the foreigners out, but the Emperess pulled a pretty swift one by throwing her support to the Boxers publicly, and getting their backing behind the scenes as she advocated expelling the Europeans.

Eventually (this was in 1900) they broke into open rebellion, and the Emperess took no action, allowing them to rampage on European interests and lay siege to the foreign compound in Beijing. The Europeans later sent a relief force to rescue those trapped there, THEY overthrew the Empire, making the rulers figureheads, and China was forced open until the Japanese invaded in the 30's.

Ok, enough about the rebellion itself. There's a story floating around about how in 1899 four bored Denver journalists got together one day and decided to concoct and agree on a story rather than wait around for something to actually happen. They decided to write the story about China, since it was still a mysterious entity in the U.S.

The story they concocted was that a team of engineers was on the way to China (via Denver) to help the Chinese government tear down the Great Wall as a sign of good will and openness. Nothing happened right off, but eventually the story got to the east coast papers, then internationally, and eventually to China itself (of course, in a mutant fashion -- China didn't want to knock the wall down, so the Europeans were planning to do this on their own), and this set the match to the kindling piled up over there, starting the rebellion.

None of the journalists ever admitted to it until the other 3 were dead and this was long past.

Great story, eh? I read it a while back and was intrigued, and just checking to get my facts straight today, I found that it's become the basis for a common church sermon about the evils of lying, as well as being used by Paul Harvey in his "The Rest of the Story" radio feature a few years ago. I doubt this is coincidence. However, the first link I hit looking this up to verify (I'm SO distrustful) basically said "it's a good story, but it's untrue. It ended up in this book in 1956, but it's traceable back to a magazine article from 1939.

Nothing more I could find would speak more clearly on that point. There are a lot of accounts of the story, but they basically stop where I do, and the claims that the story is untrue are just the one, but he doesn't seem to give a reason. If the last surviving reporter did in fact wait until the other 3 were dead, it's completely possible that the whole thing would take 40 years to be put out in that format.

On the other hand, the story does have a lot of the hallmarks of a good urban legend -- it uses names and dates that give credibility but are hard if not impossible to check out, it reinforces a moral lesson, and it ties back to an event that everyone's heard of (well, you know, if they paid any attention that day in World History).

I'm stumped. I wonder if it'd be possible to go back and check these old Denver papers from 1899, if any of them are predecessors to the current one, that would be easier to check. It wouldn't necessarily prove the cause-and-effect, but it would make it a lot harder to debunk.