15-story Building Built in 6 Days? Not Exactly

Talk about blink and you miss it!

Residents of the Chinese city of Changsha who returned home from a weeklong holiday would have had the shock of their lives, as they noticed that a new 15-story hotel had gone up while they were away.

The travelers had nothing to do with the building, of course. No, that would be the workers who completed the Ark Hotel in record time. They put together the giant pieces that make up the tall, soundproofed, thermal-insulated building in just six days.

But here's where the sound bite ends and the truth begins.

The real story of that building is not how quickly it took workers to build it, for that isn't the real question to ask. What those onsite workers did in those six days was put together a bunch of different pieces into the whole that is now standing, all from bits of prefabricated materials. Granted, that was thousands of different bits and they all were assembled within the timeframe specified.

The bottom line is that we really don't know how long it took to build the hotel, since it wasn't all built onsite. Workers could have taken months or even years to build their parts and then the "building" happened in a week. (Well, six days does not a week make, so it was a bit less than a week.)

So what does that say about truth in reporting? Have we reported the truth if we say only that "it was built in six days"? No, we have not. To be accurate, we need to include the important words construction using prefabricated materials. Any shortening of that or glossing over the key facts can result in something that's already gone viral on the Net now, namely that Chinese workers put in a superhuman effort to build a tall building in less than a week.

Well, yes, they did and no, they didn't. They certainly did the building, but the building consisted in large part of piecing together what was already done. Yes, no one was hurt in the construction of the building (and that fact needs to be communicated as well, since it was basically a day-night-day-night affair). Yes, the building looks fantastic. Yes, the countryside was changed in a very short time.

But to say that the building went from dusk to skyscraper in six days is wildly inaccurate. It misses the biggest detail of all.