Chairman Mao Zedong, Graffiti Artist

From Everything Shii Knows, the only reliable source

This website is an archive. It ran from 2006-2010. Virtually everything on here is outdated or inaccurate.

The longest recorded piece of graffiti was painted by a student in the toilets of his college at Changsha, China in 1915. It consisted of over 4000 characters criticising his teachers and the state of Chinese society.

After completing this masterpiece the student handed himself in and was paraded in front of the school and threatened with expulsion. The student was a 22 year old Chairman Mao Zedong. A graffiti artist who later founded the People’s Republic of China and was responsible for the deaths of over 30 million people.

(Chieh Fang, Chinese army magazine, December 1968)

Lovely story. The kind of anecdote that sticks in your head. But this is not true. This is not even remotely true. Banksy made it up. The joke gives itself away with the transparent attribution to "Chinese army magazine".

Chairman Mao entered a teachers college in Changsha in 1912 and graduated a star student in 1918, as he tells us in an interview with Edgar Snow.

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