A Chinese art student recently conducted an intriguing experiment in which she spent three weeks living the good life in Beijing without spending a dime, by pretending to be a well-off socialite.

Zou Yaqi, a 23-year-old art student at the University of Beijing has been getting a lot of attention for her unique graduation project which saw her disguising herself as a socialite in order to enjoy special treatment and help her survive for three weeks without spending any money. For most of May of this year, the young student slept on plush sofas in the lobbies of five-star hotels in the Chinese capital, sipping wine at various events and stuffing her face at free buffets. And she did it all just by pretending to be a rich socialite.

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A Chinese man recently went through the worst week of his life after being arrested five times in only three days due to his uncanny resemblance to a prison escapee.

In October of 2021, a criminal by the name of Zhu Xianjian managed to escape from a prison in Northeast China’s Jilin Province. Authorities scrambled to locate him, but after spending valuable and time and resources they were forced to offer a 150,000 reward, which was then bumped up to 700,000 yuan, for any information on the fugitive’s whereabouts. This made Zhu a valuable target in a part of China where the average monthly income is only 2,000, and an unlucky doppelganger of the criminal suffered the most for it, after being arrested by police no less than five times in three days.

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A 25-year-old man wound up in the emergency room with a collapsed lung after straining himself while singing karaoke at a friend’s birthday party.

Chinese media recently reported the bizarre case of a young man from Changsha, in China’s Hunan Province, who suffered a serious lung injury by trying to reach the high-pitch tones during a karaoke session. The man, known as Wang Zhe, reportedly attended a friend’s birthday party and decided to show off his voice by singing “New Drunken Concubine”, a song famous for the high-pitched tones it demands. When he reached the high-pitched part for the song, the 25-year-old man really gave it his all, only to feel a sharp pain in his chest which made him cut his act short. The pain was bearable, though, so he didn’t pay too much attention to it until the next day, when he found that he could barely breathe.

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Photos and videos of eggs with black yolks that were reportedly laid by a grey goose have been doing the rounds on social media and leaving experts scratching their heads.

The intriguing photos and videos of the black eggs were posted on Sina Weibo last week by a man surnamed Zhu from Hangzhou City, in China’s Zhejiang Province. He claimed that the eggs came from a friend of his who kept many grey geese on his farm, and who had gifted him batches of normal goose eggs before. Only this time, what looked like ordinary eggs of standard size and white color turned out to be somewhat of an oddity. When cracked, the eggs revealed a clear egg-white, but a dark grey, almost black yolk, instead of the normal yellow or light orange.

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Unable to find the medicine his two-year-old son desperately needs in China or even import it from abroad, a loving father set up his own laboratory and synthesized the drug himself.

Two-year-old Haoyang suffers from Menkes Syndrome, an ultra-rare genetic disorder that affects how copper is processed and absorbed in the body. The boy cannot move or speak and experts claim he only has months left to live but his father refuses to give up on him. As long as he draws breath, he is determined to do everything he can for his son, even if it means teaching himself chemistry and producing the medicine Chinese authorities have been unable to provide. Xu Wei, a desperate father from southwestern Kunming, has touched millions with his determination and unwavering devotion to his ailing son.

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A Chinese man was banned from an all-you-can-eat buffet in Changsha for eating kilograms of pork and prawns on every visit, causing the business to lose too much money.

A food streamer known only as Kang told local reporters that he was banned from the Handadi Seafood BBQ Buffet in Changsha city simply because he can eat more than the average patron. He admitted that he ate around 1.5kg of pork trotters during his first visit to the restaurant and 3.5kg to 4kg of prawns on his second visit before getting banned, but considers that he is being discriminated against because of his healthy appetite. The owner of the restaurant obviously disagrees.

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Chinese real-estate agencies are paying so-called “haunted house testers” to spend at least 24 hours in ‘stigmatized’ properties in order to convince potential buyers that they are completely safe.

Real-estate properties where “unnatural deaths” have occurred are really tough to sell, especially in markets where superstition and the belief in supernatural phenomena are strong. Japan, for example, has an agency that specializes in marketing and selling such stigmatized properties, because they don’t really appeal to the mainstream market. China does things a little differently. Apparently, real-estate agencies pay haunted house testers to spend at least one night in problematic homes to prove that they are not haunted.

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The people of Shenlongwan, a once-isolated village in the mountains of China’s Shanxi Province, spent 15 years carving through rock with chisels and hammers to connect their home to the world and escape poverty.

Benefiting from a very favorable climate, Shenlongwan has always been famous for its exquisite walnuts and pears, but getting their harvest to market used to be a serious challenge for the locals. That’s because until the year 2000, to reach the county seat of Changzhi City, they had to either detour through eight townships in three different provinces, or risk their lives climbing dangerous narrow ladders to reach a steep mountain pass. One day, the villagers decided that things had to change, and if the authorities wouldn’t build a road to their village, then they just had to do it themselves.

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The Hualai River, in China, is apparently the narrowest river in the world, measuring only a few dozen centimeters at its widest point.

At its widest point, the Amazon is more than 6 miles wide during the dry season, and a whopping 24 miles wide during the wet season. It’s by far the widest river in the world, but although there are plenty of other rivers at least a mile-wide at their widest point, width is not a defining characteristic of a river. In fact, there’s actually a river in China so narrow that you can easily step over it. Hualai River, on the Inner Mongolia Plateau in north China, is over 17-kilometers-long but has an average width of just 15 centimeters. At its narrowest, it is just 4-cm-wide.

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In what is being reported as a disturbing new trend, Chinese parents are allegedly resorting to corrective helmets and molds to ensure that their babies have aesthetically pleasing round heads.

The latest craze to hit China involves parents taking advantage of their babies’ soft skulls to make sure that they have round heads, instead of dreaded flat ones. A number of companies have taken advantage of the bizarre head shape preference by offering a variety of head-correcting products, from helmets to special mats and pillows designed to prevent the flattening of babies’ heads. Ironically, flat heads were once considered so lucky that children were forced to sleep with their heads on books, but the shape has fallen out of style…

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A Chinese woman has sparked controversy online with her extremely frugal lifestyle, which involves spending as little money as possible, even if it means giving up on some of life’s small pleasures.

Consumerism may be at an all-time high in the developed world right now, but the minimalist lifestyle trend is also becoming increasingly popular. In China, hundreds of thousands of people share “money-saving tips” on private social media groups, with some members standing out through their frugal lifestyles. One such individual is Wang Shenai, a 32-year-old woman from Nanjing and member of a 400,000-strong online group called Frugal Women’s Federation. She has achieved celebrity status among her peers for her extreme money-saving techniques, but also sparked controversy among the general public, after a recent interview she gave went viral.

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Shanghai-based artist Yang Yexin has been getting a lot of criticism for throwing away 1,000 grains of rice made of pure gold as part of a performance artwork to highlight current food waste.

If you’re planning on visiting Shanghai soon, you may want to keep your eyes peeled as you walk through the city streets, as you may stumble on small precious nuggets worth a pretty penny. Local artist Yang Yexin recently released a video of himself throwing 1,000 gold grains in trashcans, in drains, in the grass, and in the Huangpu River, as a way of drawing attention to food waste in modern society. The rice grains  showed in the video were made from 500 grams of gold worth over 200,000 yuan ($31,000), by a jewelry store that made them “in accordance with the actual size of each real rice grain.”

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A Chinese mother recently walked into a police station asking for help to remove a bicycle from around her neck after her 4-year-old boy put it on her and forgot the unlock code.

On October 7th, a young mother walked into a police station in Huai’an, China’s Jiangsu Province, with a bizarre “choker” around her neck – a grey and yellow bicycle locking device similar to a U-lock. She told the staff there that her son was playing with the lock next to her as she was cleaning the bathroom when he suddenly put it around her neck and locked it. She thought it funny at first, as it was her lock and she knew the unlock code, but it turned out that the boy had somehow changed it and now neither of them knew the combination to unlock it.

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A 13-year-old girl was diagnosed with a serious joint disease caused by being forced to jump rope 3,000 times a day by her mother, as a bizarre way of growing taller.

Chinese media recently reported the case of a 13-year-old girl in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province who developed traction apophysitis of the tibial tubercle after being forced by her mother to jump rope 3,000 a day in order to get taller. The girl had complained to her mother of knee pain, but she was initially accused of being lazy and was only taken to see a doctor after her symptoms worsened. After performing a physical checkup, doctors ruled out a meniscus injury but warned the mother that excessive exercise can cause serious injuries in children.

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A Chinese food stall owner was recently arrested after admitting to adding poppy husk powder to his dishes to get patrons hooked on them.

In late August of this year, the Lunan Police Station in Lianyungang City, China’s Jiangsu Province, received information that a local hot noodle stall owner might be using illegal ingredients to make his food more appetizing and more addictive. Apparently, the anonymous whistleblower had recently watched public safety warning videos about shady businessmen lacing their food with poppy husks to make them seem more appetizing, and wondered if the food stall that made the delicious hot noodles he loved so much was doing the same thing. As it turned out, they were in fact adding poppy husk powder to the noodles, to make them literally addictive, as a way to boost business.

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