Why you shouldn’t write your name on the ancient Egyptian Luxor temple

A Chinese teenager is in a lot of trouble after he wrote his full name on Egypt’s 3,500-year-old Luxor temple.

The escapades of a 15-year-old boy behaving badly may never have been exposed if it were not for another tourist named Shen, who took a photo of text reading “Ding Jinhao was here,” etched into some ancient Egyptian artwork at Luxor, and posted it on the Chinese micro blogging site Sina Weibo.

More than 100,000 angry comments later, the graffiti was tracked back to Ding Jinhao, 15, who lives in the city of Nanjing, reports BBC News.

His name, city, school and age were released online, reports The South China Morning Post. Someone also hacked the website of his former primary school, posting the picture of the vandalism on it.

The boy’s parents addressed Chinese media to issue an apology and to say that their son wrote the graffiti when he was younger, on a trip several years ago. “We have taken him sightseeing since he was little, and we often saw such graffiti. But we didn’t realize we should have told him that this is wrong,” the boy’s mother said, according to a report the Morning Post.

State-run Xinhua media reported that local Egyptian officials had tried to clean off the writing, and were able to make it look somewhat better, but could not remove it all.

The controversy comes as more tourists from mainland China leave their country and travel elsewhere. Recently, one of the country’s vice premiers issued a warning to these new tourists, telling them to project a “good image of Chinese tourists” while travelling abroad.