the harmony among the Tibetan antelopes, the train, men and nature on July 1, 2006 [the official opening date for the railway line]".

The scandal comes hot on the heels of last October's 'Tigergate' controversy, when a farmer in central China purportedly photographed an endangered South China tiger. The species had not been seen in the wild for more than 20 years and the photos were run across the media.

Numerous Chinese photographic experts have since insisted that the pictures have been faked, or even that the tiger, largely hidden by foliage, is a cardboard cut-out. The issue has yet to be resolved, and has done nothing to help China's conservation efforts.

Liu’s 'stitch-up' was achieved using Photoshop. In Mao Tse-tung's day, when anyone who fell out with the

party leader was likely to be 'removed' from the historical record, state technicians had to struggle with airbrush, scalpel and inks.

A famous 1936 photograph of Mao and fellow Chinese revolutionaries featured a smiling Po Ku. Years later, when Po fell out of favour with Mao, he was removed from the picture completely.

An iconic 1957 image of Mao standing in a dense field of wheat originally also contained the then Vice-President Liu Shaoqi. With the advent of Mao's tumultuous Cultural Revolution in 1966, Liu was denounced as a traitor and "capitalist roader" and removed from the image.

Technicians at the Xinhua photographic department simply painted more wheat plants over Liu, leaving a grinning Mao standing alone amid a bumper crop.