A Chinese billionaire has made a serious claim for the title of best boss ever, after taking half of his employees – over 6,400 people – on an all-expenses-paid nine-day holiday to France, to celebrate his company’s 20th anniversary. The epic trip is expected to cost a whopping 33 million euros, of which 13 million will be spent in Paris, and 20 million in Nice.

Li Jinyuan, the chairman of Tiens Group Company, booked rooms in 140 three, four, and five-star hotels in Paris for 6,400 employees, and made reservations at some of the most popular attractions, including The Louvre museum. The huge group, consisting of Chinese, Russian, and Kenyan employees, has also traveled to the breathtaking French Riviera, where Li Jinyuan booked a whopping 4,760 rooms in 79 hotels in Cannes and Monaco.

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A pensioner in China recently posted a very bizarre newspaper ad – he is looking for a family willing to adopt him in exchange for his monthly pension.

75-year-old Huan Qi, from Changzhou in Jiangsu province, told People’s Daily Online that he has been by himself ever since his wife passed away in 1999. His surviving relatives rarely visit him, and he is tired of waking up to an empty house, feeling lonely and miserable.

Huan’s only son lives in a work dormitory in Changzhou, so is unable to take his father in. One of his older brothers lived in Changzhou, but he died years ago, and all his other siblings live in Shandong. His granddaughter is married, with a child, so she is to busy to visit him regularly.

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Children have the power to give people a new lease of life, but for this Chinese man, a child-sized doll managed to do the trick!

Song Bo was diagnosed with a serious illness two years ago that gave him constant headaches and made him depressed. The condition was so bad that he was convinced he would never marry or have children. Little did he know that his life was about the change very soon.

While he was browsing the internet one day, Song came across a listing on e-commerce website Taobao for a child-sized love doll. He bought the 4’10” doll and fell in love with it the moment it arrived. It may have been just a realistic-looking doll to anyone else, but for Song Bo it was a new beginning. He started treating the doll like his daughter, taking it along wherever he went, and even gave it a name – Xiao Die (“little butterfly”)

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A Chinese man made the news last week for building an incredible model of his hometown, using nothing but coins! He spent an entire month painstakingly stacking up ancient and modern coins from 11 different countries to create the model, complete with roads, bridges and skyscrapers. Believe it or not, he didn’t use any glue!

He Peiqi revealed that he used his contacts in the coin trading industry to collect tens of thousands of coins for his masterpiece. Once the coins were ready, he got to work on the floor of his apartment, kneeling for two long hours each day. He carefully stacked the coins to resemble the general layout of Chongqing City.

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Taxi driver Teng Jiazhi, from Shenyang city in north China, is probably the world’s greatest selfie enthusiast. He was taking photos of himself with his passengers long before selfies became a social phenomenon, simply as a way to brighten up their day. Fondly known as “Uncle Teng”, the friendly cab driver has amassed a collection of over 30,000 selfies in the last 5 years.

Teng revealed that he came up with the unique idea ten years ago, when he picked up a couple of tourists on a winter day. “They had been standing in the cold for more than an hour for a taxi,” he recalled. “When they got in my car, they kept thanking me and offered tips. But I could not take the extra money. Before they dropped off, they wanted to take a photo with me. The gratitude they had was very comforting and that photo was the first selfie I took with my passenger.”

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This heartwarming tale of friendship is proof enough that there is still hope for the world. Chinese social media is abuzz with the story of a high school kid who has been carrying his disabled best friend at school – for the past three years!

When teenagers Xie Xu and Zhang Chi met for the first time at Daxu High School in Xuzhou, in northern China’s Jiangsu province, they made an instant connection. Soon, they were inseparable – to the extent that when Zhang found it difficult to navigate between classrooms, Xie decided to carry him around campus every single day.

“The story of the two students is so inspiring and touching,” said vice-principal Guo Chunxi. “They aren’t family, but Xie has been doing this for three years.”

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A high school in China was recently in the news for bearing a striking resemblance to a correctional facility. When questioned, the school authorities revealed that they were forced to install ‘anti-suicide iron barriers’, after two students jumped to their deaths in the past six months.

The authorities at Hengshui No. 2 High School also insisted that although they installed the barriers “out of safety concerns,” they also added a few plants to lighten up the mood. “The pot plants are supposed to make the building feel less bleak,” a teacher explained.

While the move might indicate the authorities’ concern towards students, the question remains as to why students would choose to end their lives at school. It turns out several schools in Hengshui City, where the school is located, are notorious for their harsh and exacting approach towards education. Apparently, these schools expect students to work hard all day long, with the sole purpose succeeding at the ‘gaokao’ college entrance exam.

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When a young couple from Zhuangxi village in China’s Shanxi province found an abandoned baby in 1989, they they decided to take the poor child in and raise it as their own. Since then, Chen Tianwen and his wife Guo Gairan have always been on the lookout for abandoned children.

Over time, the local Civil Affairs Bureau kept sending abandoned children to the couple for adoption, because there were no other welfare institutions back then. And Chen and Guo never refused. The couple, now in their 60s, have taken care of over forty disabled orphans in the past 26 years, along with their own three children.

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A Chinese man was recently in the news for not only winning millions of yuan in a lottery, but also for the bizarre costume he wore while collecting his prize. The man, believed to be about 40 years old, was so worried about revealing his identity that he actually turned up dressed as the popular Disney character Baymax!

Speaking to reporters, the man revealed that he had won 170 million yuan (approximately $27 million) even though he rarely buys lottery tickets.  As for the strange costume, the man revealed that his wife forced him into wearing it, fearing that old friends and long-lost relatives might suddenly show up expecting a small share of the prize. But no costume can actually help him evade the mandatory 20 percent tax on lottery winnings, which means he will have to cough up about 34 million yuan to give back to the state.

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When a man from China’s Hunan province got into a car accident last month, little did he know that his misfortune would actually affect his love life. He was rushed to the hospital following the accident, where staff began contacting his loved ones. To everyone’s great surprise, no less than seventeen women turned up at the hospital, claiming to be his girlfriends. And it didn’t take them long to figure out that they were all there to see the same guy. It turns out that the man, whose last name is Yuan, had actually been seeing all those women simultaneously and swindling them for large sums of money.

Most of the women are from Hunan province – the oldest is 40, while the youngest, a student, is only 19 years old. He was apparently married to one of them, and had a child with another. When they came to know the truth, all 17 of them were understandably shocked, and later, furious. “I was really worried when I heard that he was in the hospital,” said Xiao Li, Yuan’s girlfriend of 18 months. “But when I started seeing more and more beautiful girls show up, I couldn’t cry anymore.”

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Photographs of an abandoned old woman living in a cave have gone viral on Chinese social media, after she was spotted there by locals. When interviewed, 52-year-old Du Meiying said that she had been living in the damp cave for two years, since her family was going through a financial crisis and could no longer support her.

Du had initially lived in a room at a council house, but had to leave the place after she had a row with her elderly neighbors. With nowhere else to go, she was forced to move into a 100-sq-meter cave on the outskirts of Yichang city, in Hubei province. The woman has managed to keep herself alive for three years by collecting rainwater to drink, cook and clean with. For food, she grows cabbages outside the cave using seeds donated by a local farmer. She’s also made a bed for herself using bamboo canes, and an abandoned wooden crate serves as her table.

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34-year-old Zhang Yiyi wasn’t happy with simply being called a great writer, he wanted to look the part as well. So he spent his entire life savings of 1.4 million yuan ($225,800) on plastic surgery, in order to resemble his childhood hero and role model – William Shakespeare!

The devoted superfan had a total of 10 operations – including eye reconstruction, eyelid surgery, nose surgery and a face tuck – over the span of several months. He is yet to emulate Shakespeare’s famously bald head, but he has settled for growing his hair longer, just to improve the likeness.

Interestingly, Yiyi is an accomplished writer himself, and actually used his book royalties to pay for the cosmetic procedures. But, like the English playwright, he started off poor; he was born in humble surroundings and grew up in a debt-ridden family due to his father’s failing business. Growing up, Yiyi was able to draw parallels between his own childhood and that of Shakespeare, whose father also was declared bankrupt when the playwright was a young boy.

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Tian Haisu is the world’s first roller-skating artist – she cleverly combines her love of art and ice skating to create beautiful paintings. She specializes in traditional Chinese landscapes, but has long-since ditched the calligraphy pen for a pair of skates!

Tian, who started painting at the age of three, says that painting with skates makes her feel ‘one with her art’. Through this medium, she wants to give the traditional form of painting a ‘new lease of life’. To create these unique paintings, Tian uses a modified pair of skates with a pot of black paint attached to the wheels. She puts them on and skates in deliberate patterns over a large canvas.

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A bizarre men’s toilet at a restaurant in Taiyuan city, in northern China’s Shanxi province, has a trio of realistic female mannequins placed behind the urinals. The weird arrangement has men standing face-to-face with these scantily-clad dolls while relieving themselves!

Predictably, several of the restaurant’s male customers have expressed discomfort with the toilet setup. They complained that they weren’t able to urinate because of the “sexy” models were staring at them.

“I walked back out again when I saw the women there because I thought at first I was in the wrong place, but then I realised it was the proper place and I tried to relieve myself, it just didn’t work,” said 24-year-old customer Sun Kao. “It was very off-putting having a good-looking woman even if it was a plastic one apparently staring at me as I tried to do my business.”

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A father-and-son duo from Hunan, China, have come up with a fun and profitable business idea – creating giant Transformers robots replicas from used car parts and scrap metal.

Although they are farmers by profession, Yu Zhilin and his son Yu Lingyun switched to building the models in 2007, when they realised the potential in the Chinese market. And their hunch has proved right – they’ve managed cash in on the nation’s obsession with Transformers, the highest grossing film of all time in China. They now make one million yuan a year (nearly $170,000), selling their army of robots.

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