A woman visiting a jewelry market in China’s Yunnan Province passed out after accidentally dropping a jade bracelet worth 180,000 yuan ($26,500) and splitting it in half.

The unwritten rule of “you break it, you buy it” is usually ignored by business owners when customers accidentally break beverage bottles, clothing items or other mundane products, but when it comes to trying out expensive jewelry, it’s generally a good idea to be extra cautious, because you’ll probably have to pay for it if you break it. A female tourist visiting the Ruili Jiegao Jade market on Tuesday found that out the hard way, after accidentally dropping a jadeite bracelet and splitting it in half. When she learned that the item in question had a 300,000 yuan ($44,100) price tag and that the seller wanted compensation, she passed out.

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Students at Beijing’s Yucai High School have to be very careful when playing football on the school’s well-maintained field. That’s because it has a 100-year-old tree growing smack in the middle of it, and keeping their eye on the ball too much can result in a painful collision.

Building a football field around a tree sounds pretty stupid, but it’s not like the Chinese school had a choice. Yucai High School is reportedly surrounded by various historical buildings, and this was the only available space for a football field. Before starting work on site, the school did ask permission to have the tree transplanted someplace else, but they were notified that it was hundreds of years old, and considered a national treasure. Having it transplanted was considered too risky, so they were left with no choice but to build the field around it.

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Wang Xuebao, the head of a investment consulting firm in Xian City, China, recently made international news headlines after he set up a cash reward system to motivate his employees to lose weight.

The employees of Xian Jingtian Investment Consulting in Xian, China’s Shaanxi Province, have the opportunity to earn 100 yuan ($15) for every kilogram of body weight they lose, as part of a reward system implemented by their boss. Wang Xuebao came up with the idea after realizing that both he and his staff were spending most of their time behind a desk and weren’t moving around enough. That, coupled with an unhealthy diet had caused many of them to put on excess weight.

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For years, experts have suggested that 50,000 volts of static electricity is the highest threshold that the human body can withstand, but one Chinese scientist recently proved them wrong by passing 71,000 volts through his body and living to tell the tale.

Liu Shangshe, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, in Beijing, recently took a very hands-on approach to testing the human threshold for static electricity. In a controversial experiment to determine how much static electricity the human body can withstand, the Chinese researcher passed 71,000 volts of static electricity through his own body. According to Chinese media, Shangshe’s assistants started at 20,000 volts, ramping up the voltage in stages, causing all the hair on his body to stand on end with every discharge.

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After losing his entire family a long time ago, a Chinese doctor built his own mausoleum in the mountains of Hunan Province and has been living in it ever since, waiting for his eternal rest.

92-year-old Liang Fusheng had a beautiful family once, but he lost both his wife and his three children to disease, years ago. Left with no one to take care of him in his old age and unwilling to become a burden for the villagers he had spent a lifetime looking after, the grieving doctor started building his own mausoleum in the 1990s. He paid the villagers to carry construction materials up the rocky terrain all the way to a steep cliff overlooking the deep valley he called home, and spent 14 years and 260,000 yuan ($38,000) building his eternal resting place.

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Authorities in the Chinese city of Wuhan have recently equipped busy intersections with automatic pedestrian gates that only open when the traffic light turns green. The measure is aimed at preventing jaywalking, which has become a serious problem in many urban centers across China.

Chinese officials have been cracking down on jaywalkers for years. Jaywalking in the Asian country, often referred to as “Chinese-style street crossing”, often involves pedestrians completely ignoring traffic signals and crossing busy streets and roads, usually in large groups. This contributes heavily to traffic jams and bottlenecks in busy Chinese cities, and fines haven’t proven as effective a deterrent as authorities had hoped.

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Driven by a desire to improve the living conditions in his home, Huang Dafa, chief of Caowangba, a small village hidden deep in the mountains of Guizhou Province, China, spent 36 years digging a 10-kilometer-long water canal through three mountains.

The Chinese legend of Yu Gong speaks of an old man whose house was separated from the nearest village by two mountains. So he started digging away at them to make a direct route to the village. People mocked him for what they called a futile effort,  but he responded that while his descendants could dig for generations, the mountains couldn’t grow any higher. Moved by his determination, the gods moved the mountains, clearing the way for Yu Gong. Today, the saying “yu gong yi shan” – “the old man that could move mountains” – is used to describe ambition in the face on insurmountable odds.

But while the mythical Yu Gong was helped by divine intervention, Huang Dafa, village chief of Caowangba, in the mountains of Guizhou, could only rely on his will and the power of persuasion to build a long water channel through three karst mountains. His ambitious project began in 1959 and required 36 years of hard labor to complete. Today, his village is thriving thanks to constant running water, and he is celebrated as a real-life version of Yu Gong.

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One of China’s newest pop sensations, a group called Acrush, puts a new twist on the concept of “boy band”, as its five members are in fact androgynous women.

Acrush is set to release their debut music video at the end of this month, but the band is already causing a stir online with its unique concept. The group was recently showcased to the public in a “Husband Exhibition” – an event organized by social media giant Tencent to promote pop stars who appear on its online streaming site – and the group’s popularity simply skyrocketed. With no single to their name yet, the girls already have 900,000 followers on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. That’s a pretty big deal, considering established stars like Katie Perry have around one million fans.

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Due to the unique topography and high construction density of Chongqing, one of the most populated cities in China, architects and city planners had to come up with a unique way of developing a vital monorail line. Their solution – having the train pass straight through a 19-floor apartment building.

With the Daba, Wushan, Wuling, and Dalou Mountains to its north, east and south, most of Chongqing’s terrain is made up of hill slopes. That coupled with the lack of space due to the high building density and a population of around 49 million people, makes working on infrastructure a real challenge for architects and city planners. In 2004, when the Rail Transit No.2 was approved, they only had two choices – either tear down the whole apartment building to make room for the monorail, or clear up two floors and make a tunnel, so the train can pass through it. As unconventional as it seems, experts went for the second option, and 13 years later they are still convinced it was the right thing to do.

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Proposing with a diamond ring is nice, but it’s been done millions of times, so, in a n effort to be more original, a Chinese man decided to pop the big question to his sweetheart with a different kind of rock – a 33-tonne “meteorite”.

Liu Fei, a young man from Urumqi, China, recently made national headlines after proposing to his girlfriend with a large boulder that he claimed was a “33-tonne meteorite”. On March 14, Liu took his beloved to a public square, where he got down on one knee in a heart made of rose petals and asked her to marry him. As soon as she answered “yes”, a couple of the man’s friends unveiled a strange boulder strategically placed in the middle of the square. Apparently, this wasn’t just any rock, but a meteorite that Liu had bought for 1 million yuan ($145,000), money he had originally saved for a new apartment.

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A Buddhist nun has melted the hearts of millions of Chinese after it was revealed that she has adopted and raised over 30 girls abandoned at the gate of her temple over the last 37 years.

Master nun Changmiao, who joined the Buddhist Hailian Temple, in Ningdu, when she was 15 years old, adopted her first daughter in 1980, when she found her abandoned on the side of the road outside her temple. The infant had ants crawling all over her body, and while curious onlookers gathered to see her, none of them were willing to do anything to help. So Changmiao decided to take her in and raise the girl as her own. Little did she know that this was only the first of many daughters, all of them rescued.

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A few years ago, most of the 2,000 or so villagers in Donggaozhuang, northern China, were struggling to put food on the table by growing wheat and corn. Now, dozens of them are millionaires and more on well on their way of making six-figure fortunes after switching to selling yarn online.

Donggaozhuang’s success story started with the idea of one villager, who set up an e-shop on Taobao, China’s largest online commerce platform, to sell yarn. Things went way better than he had anticipated, and in just three months, he made a profit of $2,900, a small fortune, considering that the highest minimum wage in China is currently around $330 per month. Word of his booming business spread like wildfire around Donggaozhuang, and the village elders soon approached the man, asking him to teach other members of the community how to set up their own online businesses.

Since yarn had worked so well for Donggaozhuang’s first online entrepreneur, everyone followed in his footsteps and they all started making money. Realizing the potential of their businesses, many sold their lands and put their farming days behind them to focus solely on their e-shops. They started buying wool, turning it into yarn and selling that on Taobao.

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Tong Junhai, a 44-year-old man from China, recently achieved international fame, after a video showing him inflating a tyre tube using only one of his nostrils has gone viral online.

On February 25, Tong Junhai stunned a crowd at Huancheng Park, in the city of Xi’an, northwestern China, with a very unusual stunt. Dressed as a Kung Fu master, the man started boasting that he could inflate a medium-size tyre tube using only his nose. And to show people just how difficult the task is for a regular person, he invited a naysayer to try it himself, using his mouth. The man tried blowing into the rubber house, but to no avail.

When it was time for Junhai to show off his bizarre skill, he got into a half-squat position, put the hose to one of his nostrils, blocked the other with his thumb, and started pumping air into the tube. You can see the blood veins on his forehead popping out as he struggles to push the air out of his lungs and into the tyre tube, but eventually, he pulls it off.

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A group of Chinese women recently made headlines after being photographed while lying in shallow graves on the outskirts of Chongqing City. It was revealed that they were taking part in a bizarre ritual called “graveyard meditation” which allegedly helps them cope with divorce.

Graveyard meditation is the brainchild of Liu Taijie, a 30-year-old divorcee who now helps other women get over romantic breakups. After getting married at the age of 19, and having a baby at 21, Liu went through a hard divorce in 2015, after also failing to launch her own business. It was a tough time, but she managed to pull through, and she now wants to help other women understand that life goes on and they have to put the past behind them, where it belongs.

“I know how a woman felt when she was feeling abandoned. I had the thought of committing suicide when I got divorced,” Ms. Liu said. When a person is desperate, he or she could almost feel they’re near death. By lying in the grave, my students could try to experience death. This will remind them that they have not done many things in their life and that they need to forget about the past and start a new life.” Read More »

Zhao Yongjiu, a 56-year-old street cleaner from Shenyang, China, recently won the internet after it was revealed that over the last three decades he has helped fund the education of 37 impoverished children by donating most of his monthly salary.

Every day, the kindhearted sanitation worker leaves his home in Shenyang, China’s Liaoning Province, at 4:30 in the morning and returns at 9 p.m.. He earns a monthly salary of 2,400 yuan ($350), barely enough to make a decent living, but he somehow manages to live on way less, donating the rest to poor kids, so they can afford to go to school and get a proper education. He has been doing this for the last three decades and doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Zhao estimates that during that time he has donated around 170,000 yuan ($24,750), and put 37 disadvantaged kids through school.

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