New urban myth? Chinese guy buys 99 iPhone 6s to propose to girl, gets rejected

There are lots of creative ways to propose to your sweetheart. And if you want to spend loads of money on a proposal, there are lots of ways to do that too. But here’s a Chinese guy who kept things creative and expensive when he proposed to a rather uncomfortable-looking girl last week surrounded by a heart-shaped wall supposedly built with 99 iPhone 6s.

That’s all we actually know, and in fact, we don’t even really know that much – the boxes certainly look like the iPhone 6’s packaging, but none of the photos are high-res enough to even confirm that part of the story. Nevertheless, this quickly caught the attention of the Chinese press, who seem to have spiced it up a bit, and then the foreign press, who spiced it up even more.

The story seems to have started with this November 7 post from a relatively unknown Guangzhou-based Weibo user. That user, whose account is unverified, provided the photos and the explanation that the guy, a post-90s gamer or game programmer, had proposed to someone with 99 iPhone 6s.

This original poster doesn’t say that the man was rejected, and I can’t find much evidence to that effect among the Weibo posts that created the initial burst of interest either. But when the story hit Tencent Games, the Chinese site wrote that “it is said that” the girl hasn’t yet accepted his proposal. Who exactly is “saying” that is unclear, and the Tencent article even states directly that the details are unverified, and that the whole thing could just be a publicity stunt.

But by the time the story hit the Western press, the story had somehow become even more dramatic, and any trace of uncertainty about its veracity had vanished. In this story in The Independent, the tragic proposal happened on Singles Day (which it clearly didn’t), and the vaguely-sourced rejection rumor has somehow become fact. Whoops!

It’s very possible she did reject him, to be fair – we’ve only got a few photos to go on, but the woman doesn’t look like she’s about to jump into his arms and kiss him in any of them. Still, the spread of this story goes to show that you shouldn’t always believe what you read, and that the Western press should probably be more careful when reporting on China. There’s no denying the story makes for a grabby headline, but parts of The Independent‘s take on it are either unconfirmed or straight-up untrue.