The myth about China’s Great Wall has come tumbling down, thanks to China’s first person in space.
For decades, the Chinese said their most famous creation was visible from space. Elementary school textbooks in the world’s most populous nation still proclaim that the structure can be seen by the naked eye of an orbiting cosmonaut.
But the myth was shattered upon Yang Liwei’s return from a 21 1/2-hour space jaunt last year, so schoolbooks will be rewritten, the Beijing Times newspaper reported Friday.
The wall stretches thousands of miles across northern China but is only a few yards wide, making it impossible to see from space.
An Education Ministry official said the textbook’s publisher was informed to stop printing the essay that recounts the falsehood.
The Web site for NASA in the U.S. says that while many manufactured objects can be seen from space, the Great Wall is not among them.
