A Chinese farmer with only three years of school under his belt has dedicated the last 16 years of his life to teaching himself law, hoping to bring down a state-owned chemical company that has been polluting his village and affecting his livelihood.

Wang Enlin, from Yushutun village, in China’s Heilongjiang Province, will never forget that day in 2001, when his village and the surrounding farmland were flooded with toxic waste. It was the eve of the Lunar New Year, and Wang and his neighbors were playing cards and making dumplings, when they notice that the house they were in was being flooded with waste water from the nearby Qihua Group, a state-owned enterprise. That same year, Mr Wang wrote a letter to the Land Resources Bureau of Qiqihar, complaining about the pollution, but during his dealings with officials, he was repeatedly asked to provide evidence that his village and the land he and his neighbors survived off of had indeed been contaminated.

“I knew I was in the right, but I did not know what law the other party had broken or whether or not there was evidence,” the 60-something farmer recently told reporters. The easiest thing to do would have been to hire a lawyer, but Wang and his neighbors could barely afford to put food on the table, so professional legal council was definitely not an option. But Wang Enlin would not give up so easily, and even though he had only attended school until Third Grade, he decided to study law himself and find out what kind of evidence he needed to collect.

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In an effort to ease the intense pressure that its students face in China’s notoriously rigid exam-based education system, a school in Nanjing has created a “grade bank” that lets students “borrow” grades so that they can pass exams, and then repay them in subsequent tests.

Oh man, I wish we had something like this when I was in school, because this system sounds awesome! So here’s how it works: the innovative mark bank allows students to loan marks to make up for a failing grade in any exam. But, just like regular banks, it requires “clients” to pay back the loan on time, with interest. Thus, students have to make up for the loan by scoring extra points in future exams. Some teachers also allow the students to repay the bank by conducting lab experiments or giving public speeches. Pupils who default on their loans are blacklisted by the bank, just like in real life.

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A Thai woman living in Virgina was recently convicted for masterminding an elaborate designer purse scheme that involved buying hundreds of authentic accessories online and returning Chinese knock-offs for full refunds. She would then sell the originals on sites like eBay, for about $2,000 each.

Over a number of years, 41-year-old Praepitcha Smatsorabudh, a preschool teacher in Arlington County, used an ingenious scam to supplement her day-job paycheck. She would buy high end bags like Gucci, Burberry and Fendi online, and then return fake ones she had specially made in China and Hong Kong. Court documents revealed that in order to cover her trail, she traveled to over 60 T.J. Maxx stores in 12 states, to return the bags, and used 16 different credit cards when making new purchases. Smatsorabudh’s scheme was so incredibly successful that at one point she was T.J. Maxx’s number one online client in the world.

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A school principal in China’s Henan province was recently suspended for making young students take tests outdoors in smog so thick that they could barely see their papers, despite receiving orders to close the school.

On December 20th, 480 students from the No. 1 Middle School in Linqi town, Linzhou, were forced to take their tests on the school’s an outdoor football field, in heavy smog. Photos taken by concerned parents and later sent to local media outlets show the children struggling to make out the writing on their papers, but the principal apparently decided that the smog was not “severe”.

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A 71-year-old businessman from China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region has earned the nickname “The Wolf King” after dedicating the last nine years of his life to raising 150 wolves of 8 different species, in a valley that has now come to be known as Wild Wolf Valley.

Yang Changsheng discovered his passion for wolves in 2007. He was visiting a friend when he noticed a caged female wolf with its paws tightly bound in manacles and chains. She looked miserable, so he asked his friend to open the cage so he could loosen the manacles. Some might say that getting so close to a fierce predator was a stupidly brave thing to do, but to Yang’s surprise, the wolf didn’t seem bothered or threatened by him, and as soon as the cage door opened, she just couched down at his feet like a pet dog. Impressed by the scene he had witnessed, his friend sent him the wolf and several wolf cubs born a few days earlier as a gift.

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Jack Ma, founder of internet giant Alibaba Group, has one of the most recognized faces in China, but he’s not exactly famous for his good looks. Still, that hasn’t stopped on young entrepreneur from spending a small fortune on plastic surgery just so he could look more like the popular billionaire.

Huang Jian, a young man in Shenzhen, claims that he has so far spent around one million yuan ($145,000) on facial plastic surgery, in an effort to make himself look more like Jack Ma. The procedures were done in South Korea, Asia’s premier destination for extreme plastic surgery. Jian says that he is a big fan of China’s second richest man and is undergoing this extreme makeover in the hopes of one day meeting his idol.

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People generally avoid going into public toilets, unless they absolutely have to. Most of them are dirty, uninviting places, but that’s definitely not the case with this recently opened five-star public restroom in Chongqing, China.

Public toilets are hardly-ever news-worthy topics, but after seeing photos of this new five-star facility in the Bishan district of Chongqing, I decided it was too cool not to share. The 150-square-meter restroom not only features an elegant interior design and quality materials like marble floors, granite imitation walls, lacquered wood doors and urinal separators, and even chandeliers, but also a central heating system and 24-hour air-conditioning that keep the place at a constant 26 degrees Celsius all year round.

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Seeing his wife go through the excruciatingly painful process of passing kidney stones, a farmer in Jiangxi Province, China, created an ingenious bed that flips over and vibrates to help dislodge the stones.

Zhu Qinghua, a 52-year-old rice farmer from Jiangxi had been thinking of ways of helping his wife since 1993, when she had her left kidney removed because of kidney failure, and stones were discovered in her right one. Doctors told them that surgery to remove the stones was too dangerous for a person with one kidney, so she was advised to eliminate them naturally before they became too large. Zhu says inspiration struck in 1997, when doctors advised his wife to stand upside down for a few minutes every day, to help dislodge the kidney stones. That’s when he started working on his patented kidney stone-removing bed.

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Sick of getting temporarily blinded by drivers using their high-beam headlights at night, more and more Chinese are equipping the rear windows of their cars with scary reflective decals featuring ghosts, vampires or monsters.

Dozens of shops on large e-commerce sites like Taobao are selling scary rear-window decals with graphics ranging from ghostly figures and women with bloody mouths to vampires and yellow-eyed werewolves, and judging by the number of photos currently doing the rounds on Chinese social media, people are actually using them to deter drivers from keeping their high beam headlights on when driving behind them. The bizarre stickers are apparently barely visible in the dark or normal lighting conditions, but light up when a bright light is shone on them.

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A zoo in Dezhou City, east China’s Shandong Province, recently attracted criticism for placing a husky dog in a pen populated by a dozen wolves, as a way to create more fun for tourists.

Chinese animal lovers raised the alarm about the unusual member of the wolf pack after a video shot by a tourist at Dezhou zoo went viral on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. He explained that he happened to be visiting the zoo when he saw a strange-looking wolf limping around in a pen full of actual wolves. It didn’t take him long to figure out that the animal was some kind of Husky-Alaskan-mix canine.

“As we all know, wolves like living with each other and have a strong sense of territory,” the man, surnamed Huang, wrote in the post. “Don’t you think it would be miserable for the dog to live there?” He also mentioned that the dog was obviously wounded, as it was struggling to walk on just three legs. His video attracted a lot of attention, with the vast majority of commenters accusing the zoo for acting irresponsibly.

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Chinese companies have been known to subject their employees to some of the most unusual and degrading punishments imaginable, but this latest one takes the cake. According to recent new reports, a company Hanzhong, Shaanxi province, decided to punish who failed to meet their sales targets by feeding them a disgusting cocktail of baijou liquor and live mealworms.

The degrading punishment was reportedly carried out in in a plaza in downtown Hanzhong, where 60 company employees were summoned for an outdoor meeting. Witnesses took to the internet to report that the group of young workers was approached by a a man carrying bags of live mealworms, who proceeded to pick various numbers of them with chopsticks and drop them in plastic cups full of baijou. Employees who had failed to reach their sales quota were asked to step forward and drink the gag-inducing cocktail.

Five or six poor-performing employees were reportedly asked to drink the worm-infested baijou in front of their colleagues. One of the employees, who chose to remain anonymous, later told the Huashang Daily newspaper that each of the “offending” workers had to swallow four worms for every client they lost.

One of the recipients of the brutal punishment was a pregnant woman, who refused to drink the cocktail for fear of losing the pregnancy. “I can’t eat worms now, I can’t drink either, unless I don’t want my baby,” she reportedly told the sales manager. Eventually, a male colleague received the cruel punishment on her behalf.

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Ejiao, or donkey skin gelatin, is considered one of the three treasures of traditional Chinese medicine. It is used to treat a wide range of ailments from simple colds to insomnia and impotence, and demand in the Chinese market is soaring like never before. Millions of donkeys are slaughtered all around the world and their hides transported to China to be melted into the miracle gelatin that many believe will keep them looking youthful and even prolong their life.

Dong’e county, in northern China, is the epicenter of ejiao production. Here, over 100 factories melt thousands of donkey hides into gelatin, every week, and after running out of domestic stock, they are now relying on imports from developing countries to sustain the huge demand. China’s donkey population has dwindled from 11 million during the 1990s to just 6 million today, due to both industrialization and massive slaughtering for ejiao. With local stock of donkeys going dry at an alarming rate, some factories have opened their own farms to breed and kill up to 10,000 donkeys a year, but with some of them processing over 1 million donkey hides in the same period, it’s hardly a sustainable plan. Which is why many factories have turned their attention to the foreign market.

Various countries in Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East are supplying millions of donkey skins for the Chinese ejiao market. With the price for donkeys having skyrocketed from around $65 a decade ago to $315 today, some livestock breeders are switching to donkeys exclusively, because the trade is so profitable. But some governments have already banned China from buying their donkeys because they realized that it would eventually decimate the animal population. In September, Nigeria announced a ban on the export of donkeys in September, after the trade increased three times in one year, mainly to Asian markets. “If the export continues the animals will be decimated,” Atte Issa, a Nigerian government official told the BBC.

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This year’s Singles Day, China’s version of Black Friday, is scheduled to break sales records, but the employees of one catering company in Chonqing will not be able to spend as much money on discounted items as they would have liked, because their employer decided to hold their paychecks until after the holiday, so they wouldn’t spend their hard earned money on junk.

Workers recently found out about management’s controversial decision through a notice posted at the main entrance of the company. The document mentioned that instead of receiving their paychecks on November 10th, as usual, they would have to wait until next month, but only because their 31-year-old boss was worried that they would waste their salaries on junk they didn’t even need. He let them know that he himself had spent almost 20,000 yuan ($2,942) during last year’s sale, which included a 8,000 yuan ($1,176) computer he never even uses. So to keep them form making the same mistake, he decided that their money’s safer with him.

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An elderly couple in Haikou, China’s Hainan Province, have been sharing their home with a 60 kilogram, 3.7-meter-long python for seven years, raising it as their child and even taking it for walks around their neighborhood.

68-year-old Shi Jimin, a retired meat processing worker, adopted the python in 2009, to save it from certain death. A fish and snake vendor had come by his workplace, and managed to sell his entire supply, except for a small 30-cm long snake that no one had wanted. The man had said that if no one was interested, he was just going to get rid of it, which is when stepped in and asked the vendor how much he wanted for the reptile. Shi says that he eventually got it for free, as the man was just going to kill it or throw it away somewhere anyway. So he took the young snake home to his wife, not knowing that it would grow up into a cattle-eating behemoth.

But even after realizing that they had adopted a python, the elderly couple had no problem sharing their home with their pet, which they consider more as a child. In the last seven years it has grown to an impressive 3.7 meters and weighs around 120 pounds. But experts say it’s still young and bound to get even bigger. Still Shi and his wife are not concerned for their safety, and allow the snake to freely slither around their home during the day. It often sits on their laps as they watch TV together, or just finds a comfortable spot and sits there like a good boy. In they evening, the couple give the snake a warm bath, and before going to bed, they take the python to his very own bedroom.

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There are few things that men hate more than going on long shopping sprees with their wives or girlfriends, so one Chinese mall has come up with the “husband nursery”, a special place where guys can kick back and relax while their better halves shop till they drop.

Just as mothers drop their young kids at the nursery to be looked after while they tend to their daily business, so to can wives and girlfriends leave their male partners at the husband nursery located on the third floor of the newly-opened Vanke Mall in the Minhang district of Shanghai. Instead of having to put up with their miserable-looking faces as they follow them around through dozens of shops, women can leave guys in this special room to kill time by watching TV, reading magazines, sitting in a massage chair or taking a nap in of the comfortable armchairs.

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