Many timelines of the Boxer Rebellion that you can find online provide this piece of information:
July 16, 1900: London Daily Mail publishes a report that all legation besieged had been massacred, including mercy killing of women and children, Russians boiled to death in oil, etc. The story was false, fabricated by a reporter in Shanghai.
However, I can’t find information about this story anywhere else.
Did this fabrication actually happen? When, how, and by whom did the reportedly false story become exposed?
I am familiar with many of the fake stories about China and the boxer uprising that were published in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but have never heard of this specific one.
News reporting in North China at this time appears to generally have been a bit shoddy at this time – on 14 June 1900, the North China Daily News reported the death of Baron Clemens von Ketteler, and on 17 June the New York Times published an obitutary. Von Ketteler would be killed by Qing troops on 20 June. This strange misreporting was taken as evidence of an inadvertently leaked Qing plot to have von Ketteler assassinated.^1
The reporting of the storming of the legation quarters was similarly misinformed. The 55-day siege of the Beijing legation quarters had involved the cutting of telegraph lines, precluding the transmission of information to Shanghai, while the ignominious Seymour Expedition of 10-28 June saw the Qing and Boxers tear up the rail line linking Beijing to Tianjin. For all intents and purposes, the legation members were as good as dead to the outside world, and rumours were the best infromation that could be obtained. The Gaselee Expedition, which set out on 4 August, did so unaware whether the legation quarters would still be standing when they arrived, which they did on 15 August.^1
The specific piece of fake news (which would have been pretty much debunked upon the discovery that the legation members had survived) can be found, among other places, here at newspaperarchive.com, and it is very vague as to its specific source for the events. All the Mail says is that it received a report from Shanghai marked 'urgent' from their special correspondent, but it's pretty much unverifiable. Interestingly, in the financial news section on page 2 it notes that it was the 'Dullest Day for Years' in the City, and that 'in the absence of news from either Pekin or South Africa members took advantage of the fine weather to stay away,' so it seems there was an appetite in London for sensationalism.^2
Sources, Notes and References