Unless you’ve been living under a rock your whole life, you’ve probably seen one of those souvenir statues of Maitreya, aka the Laughing Buddha. They’ve pretty popular even in non-Buddhist countries, and many people use them as good luck charms. But you know what’s better than a Laughing Buddha statue? A living, breathing Smiling Buddha.

Photos and videos of an overweight, bald man posing as the Laughing Buddha on a stage somewhere in China have been circulating on social media ever since last fall. Back then, Chinese newspapers reported that the man would get showered with money every time he performed, as people hoped their offering would earn them divine favor. He just sat there in the Buddha’s iconic position with his flabby belly exposed and a big smile on his face, but the audience loved it.

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Kong Zhenlan, a 71-year-old woman from China’s Shanxi Province, has dedicated the last four decades of her life to adopting and raising orphaned children, making sure that they had food on the table and got access to education.

Even though she could barely afford to support herself on a modest income, Kong Zhenlan couldn’t bear to walk by the orphanage in Jixian County every day and see so many children struggling in abhorrent poverty. One day, she stopped by and picked one of the orphans in her arms; that’s when she knew she had to to something to make their life better. The modest woman started adopting these abandoned children and raising them as her own. Over the last 47 years, she has adopted 45 orphans, some of whom grew up to become doctors and lawyers.

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A Chinese man who recently turned up at a hospital in Yunnan Province with a swollen eyelid and excruciating headache was shocked to learn that his condition was caused by several pieces of wood stuck in his brain.

The 41-year-old man, surnamed Zhou, told doctors that he first realized something was wrong about two months ago, when an old scan on his right eyelid became swollen and his occasional headaches started getting worse. Unable to deal with the pain, he finally went to the First People’s Hospital in Yunnan Province for treatment, where a computerized tomography scan revealed that he had several pieces of wood with a combined length of 11 cm stuck in his brain. Asked how on Earth he had ended up with so much would deep inside his skull, Zhou recalled an accident that had occurred half a decade prior.

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A Chinese animal lover who took in hundreds of stray dogs over the last two years is struggling to make ends meet despite having a stable job and his own business. He has accumulated a debt of 600,000 yuan ($87,000), but he refuses to give up on his four-legged friends.

Up until two years ago, Zhang Kai, a 41-year-old man from Chengdu, China, had a peaceful, comfortable life. He was the manager of a state-owned company and had just opened his own travel agency. But everything changed when his 13-year-old dog, which he had raised since 2003 suddenly died. The tragic event left a void in his life, and somehow made him pay more attention to the countless strays in his city in need of a home. At first, he took in two of them and raised them in his travel agency office, but before he knew it he was taking care of eight strays. Things just snowballed from there, and today he is struggling to take care of 260 dogs, relying solely on bank loans and donations.

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Last week, a Chinese man went to the hospital after experiencing severe chest pain and was shocked to learn that his discomfort was caused by the house keys he thought he had lost the night before after getting drunk with his friends.

On June 7th, a 26-year-old man, identified solely as Chang, from Guangdong, China, went out for drinks with his friends, to celebrate the end of another long work week. When he got home in the middle of the night, he searched for his keys, but couldn’t find them, so he called someone inside and asked them to let him. He was pretty drunk, so he didn’t give his lost keys a second thought, instead going straight to bed. The next morning,  as the numbing effect of the alcohol started to wear off, Chang started experiencing a sharp pain in his chest, so he went to the local Dongguan Hospital to have it checked out.

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A computer programmer in China caused quite a stir on social media recently after posting that he created a custom chatbot to answer his girlfriend’s texts 24/7, because he was too busy to do it himself.

Li Kaixiang, who works as a software development engineer for Chinese internet giant JD.com, said that he was often too busy at work to answer his girlfriend’s daily texts, but he also didn’t want to hurt her feelings by ignoring her, so he came up with the idea to create a chatbot to answer and send messages on his behalf. He even posted some screenshot of the chatbot’s conversation with his girlfriend on WeChat, and it definitely looks like the software did pretty good. He also mentioned that on the first day that the chatbot went online, it exchanged around 300 texts with his girlfriend, which kind of explains why he created it in the first place.

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An 11-year-old boy from Xinxiang city, China’s Henan province, has been praised for taking on the mission of saving his father’s life by eating as much as he possibly can.

Lu Zikuan’s father was diagnosed with leukemia seven years ago and has been treated with medication ever since. However, last August his health started deteriorating drastically and doctors informed him that his only option was a life-saving bone marrow transplant. After screening members of his family for possible matches, they found that the only viable donor was Zikuan, who was 10-years-old at the time. Despite his young age, the primary school student was eager to go under the knife to save his father’s life. But there was one big problem, he weighed only 30 kg, and doctors told the family that they wouldn’t operate on him unless he gained at least 15 kg more. So in March of this year he started stuffing his face with as much fatty food as possible.

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Bamboo was already one of the most versatile resources available to man, but villages in various parts of China have come up with yet another use for the giant grass – living casks for maturing liquor.

Villagers and liquor producers in several Chinese provinces have come up with a way of using living bamboo trunks to produce alcoholic drinks that are proving very popular with tourists. By using high-pressure injection techniques, they fill up sections of living bamboo trunks with rice wine or sorghum and leave it to mature for several months, up to a year and a half, during which time the liquor is infused with flavone (the liquid naturally released by the trunk) and the sap of bamboo. This apparently gives the liquor a pure, pleasant aroma and detoxifying properties. It also lowers alcohol content, as the plant absorbs part of it.

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A wealthy farmer from China’s Sichuan province has been arrested for allegedly stealing chickens and ducks from several villages in Linshui county in order to buy gas for his “thirsty” $290,000 BMW.

Police in Linshui had been getting reports of chickens and ducks getting stolen from several villages in the county since April, but never expected the culprit to be one of the richest farmers in the area, a man who happens to live in a multi-story villa and drives a 2 million yuan luxury BMW. Apparently, it was the latter that pushed Qiang (pseudonym) to a life of petty crime, as after running into financial woes, he found it tough to afford gas for his gorgeous BMW. So he started stealing people’s domestic birds, breeding them on his farm, and selling them off for gas money.

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A Chinese woman recently took to social media to express her surprise at the gift she received from her boyfriend of May 20, one of three annual romantic holidays in China. She apparently received the usage rights to 210 hectares of open ocean.

Located off the coast of Shandong province, near Cheniushan Island, the stretch of ocean previously belonged to to a fish farming company and was acquired by the woman’s boyfriend via online auction. The man, surnamed Zhang, reportedly paid 682,662 yuan (around $99,000) for it and offered it to his girlfriend as a way to make amends for not buying her a gift on May 20. While not the most romantic gesture in history, it definitely gave the woman a chance to boast about her unusual gift on social media.

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There’s no question that artificial intelligence has come a long way in the last few years, but apparently it’s not yet advanced enough to tell the difference between someone using a mobile phone and someone scratching their face.

Chinese media recently reported the case of a man in Jinan, eastern Shandong province, who received a notification that he had broken the law by talking on the phone while driving. The letter also had a surveillance picture of his so-called offence attached, which showed him holding his right hand to his cheek. Only the man didn’t remember using his phone behind the wheel that day, and the picture didn’t show a phone either, just his hand in an awkward position near his face. It turns out the motorist was just scratching his face when the picture was taken. Even so, he learned that he would receive two penalty points on his licence and be required to pay a 50 yuan ($7.25) fine.

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A Hong Kong woman reportedly suffered a case of short-term amnesia which made her unable to remember anything from the last 10 years of her life, after straining too hard on the toilet due to constipation.

We all know that straining too hard when trying to move bowels can have a host of side effects, including minor ones like dizziness and headache, and life-threatening ones like strokes. However, according to anecdotal evidence that went viral on Chinese social media last week, we can now add short-term amnesia to the list of possible symptoms associated with over-straining on the toilet. Experts say that while unlikely, this side-effect may be explained by the lack of oxygen to certain parts of the brain.

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A Chinese man has been labeled a victim of abuse after being slapped in public a whopping 52 times by his girlfriend, who was apparently upset that he hadn’t bought her a new smartphone for Chinese Valentine’s Day.

While most Chinese couples celebrated May 20th, or “520” – one of the Asian country’s three yearly ‘lovers’ days’ – in a romantic way, one pair in Sichuan province decided to cause a shocking scene instead. Videos captured by nearby surveillance cameras as well as passers-by and later shared on social media showed a young woman slapping her boyfriend in the street while viciously scolding him for allegedly failing to buy her a new smartphone as a gift. Although the footage doesn’t show all the slaps, police later confirmed that the man endured no less than 52 of them under the shocked gazes of strangers gathered to witness his humiliation.

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A 12-year-old by from Nanning, China recently won first prize at a regional science and innovation contest for creating an automatic clothes drying rack that retracts whenever it detects rain and extends again when the sky clears. The ingenious contraption impressed a lot of people, but it was the inspiration behind it that really got people talking.

Lu Jiezhen, a sixth-grade student at North-East Women’s Education Center in, Nanning, China’s Guangdong Province, came up with the idea for the automatic rain-detecting drying rack after being yelled at by his mother. One day, she had to leave the house and asked him to look after the clothes she had hung out to dry, reminding him that he was to take them inside in case it started to rain. Needless to say, the 12-year-old started playing around the house and forgot to pick up the clothes when the rain inevitably came. When his mother returned, she found the clothes soaking wet, and scolded him for disobeying her. But instead of finding excuses, Lu started thinking about a solution that would make his forgetfulness irrelevant in the future.

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A Chinese DIY enthusiast has become an overnight sensation thanks to his unusual approach to solving household problems. He uses foods like instant noodles, Oreo cookies and rice to expertly fix various pieces of furniture, leaving them as good as new.

The unconventional handyman, who goes by Xiubandrng on Chinese video upload platform Douyin, has been wowing Chinese fans with his skills for months, but the Western world was only introduced to his amazing DIY work this week, when a video of him repairing a broken sink with dry noodles and glue went viral on several social networks. He just fills the hole in the sink with noodles, pours some glue over them, smooths it out with an abrasive strip and paints the whole thing white. When he’s done, the sink looks brand new.

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