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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Wang Tianchang and his family moved into the Gobi Desert 22 years ago, at a time when most people were running away from the encroaching wasteland. The Wangs have been fighting the desert ever since, becoming a symbol of China’s anti-desertification campaign.

Desertification is one of China’s most serious environmental problems. The great Gobi Desert at stretching along the border with Mongolia has so far eaten away about 650 million acres of the country’s land and is showing no signs of slowing down. As it moves ever deeper into the heart of China, massive sandstorms blow sand into the capital Beijing and other major cities, putting millions of lives at risk. The Great Green Wall, a reforestation program designed to create a 2,800-mile tree barrier at the edge of the advancing desert has had limited success so far, but the Chinese media machine focuses less on the shortcomings and more on the successes, using everyday heroes like Wang Tianchang and his family.

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A near-vertical cliff wall in the mountains of Shennongjia Nature Reserve, China’s Hubei Province, is home to over 700 wooden boxes which make up one of the country’s last sanctuaries for native wild bees.

Beekeeping has been carried out in China since at least the 2nd century AD, and roughly half of the world’s supply of honey comes from the Asian country, but few know that over 80% of the native bee population is now extinct. The introduction of the European honey bee (Apis Mellifera) is considered the main cause of the drastic decline of native Chinese bees. It has brought viral diseases, has been known to attack Chinese honeybee hives, and interfere with its mating rituals. Today, the Chinese honey bee (Apis Cerana Cerana) is listed as an endangered species, and the cliff-hanging hives of the Shennongjia Nature Reserve make up one of the few protected sanctuaries in the country.

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Built along the Nanxi River, between the steep mountains of China’s Yunnan Province, Yanjin county is widely regarded as the world’s narrowest city.

Looking at Yanjin county from above, it’s hard to believe that such a settlement actually exists in real life. The narrow stretch of usable land sandwiched between the troubled waters of the Nanxi River and steep mountains on either side hardly seems like a suitable location for a city of roughly 450,000 people, but that’s exactly what makes Yanjin so special. It looks more like something you’d expect to see in a fantasy movie, or in a building simulation game than a modern-day city.

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A Chinese man had to undergo a complicated gastroscopic operation to have a 15-cm toothbrush removed from his stomach, after accidentally swallowing it during his morning routine.

The unnamed man from Taizhou, in China’s Jiangsu Province told doctors that he got up one morning, about 10 days ago and decided to follow his usual routine, which included brushing his teeth before breakfast. Only he was sleepier than usual and while brushing the teeth at the back of his mouth, he accidentally dropped the 15-cm plastic brush and it slipped into his throat. Realizing his mistake, he tried reaching after it, but the slippery plastic handle proved difficult to grab, and he only managed to push it further.

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The Guoliang Tunnel connecting the clifftop village of Guoliang, in China’s Henan province, to the outside world was carved by hand using basic tools like chisels and hammers, and is now referred to as the eight wonder of the world.

For centuries, the people of Guoliang, a small Chinese village perched atop a cliff in the Taihang Mountains, were virtually cut off from the outside world. The only way in and out of the village was the “Sky Ladder,” 720 steps carved into the mountains during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). This made it extremely hard to get things in and out of the village, so most of the 300 or so inhabitants considered moving away in search of a better, easier life. However, everything changed in 1972, when the village council decided to carve a tunnel through the mountains to finally connect Guoliang to the outside world.

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Chinese media recently reported the case of a 14-year-old boy who shocked police when he accused his father of “illegal child labor”, because he had been forced to do chores around the house.

The bizarre incident allegedly took place this week in Ma’anshan, China’s Anhui province. Sick of seeing his son with his hands and eyes glued to his smartphone, and ignoring his homework and studies, a parent decided to give the boy a taste of life’s hardships, and asked him to put down the handheld and do some housework. Angry with his father making him take a break from his phone, the reportedly smartphone-addicted teenager snuck out of the house when his father wasn’t paying attention and went straight to the police station. There, he proceeded to accuse his father of “illegal child labor”.

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Chinese media recently reported the shocking case of a 13-year-old daughter who was found by fishermen on a deserted island, where her parents had taken her as a bizarre form of re-education.

This weekend, police in Weihai City, China’s Shandong Province, were notified by local fishermen about the presence of a young girl on a small deserted island, about a kilometer from the mainland. The girl had allegedly approached them claiming that she had been taken to the island against her will by her parents, and begged them to take her back to shore. Upon reaching the island, police found the girl and her parents, and learned that their presence there was a strange form of teaching the 13-year-old girl about hardship and adversity.

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A Chinese woman and her male accomplice were recently detained by police after she rented her ex boyfriend’s car and ran dozens of red lights over a period of two days, as a weird way to get back at him.

Chinese media recently reported a bizarre case in which a young woman from Shaoxing, East China’s Zhejiang Province, attempted to exact revenge on her ex-partner for leaving her for another woman, by using his own car to get him in trouble with the law. The woman, known only as Lou, allegedly convinced another man to rent her former boyfriend’s car via an online car renting app, and then used the vehicle to run 49 red lights and break other traffic rules, with the explicit intent to get the owner in trouble with the law.

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Kadaknath is an Indian chicken breed popular for the quality of its meat and eggs, but primarily because of the black color of the skin and its dark-colored meat.

Chicken meat is the world’s most consumed form of protein, with over 98.5 million tons consumed every year. But one has to wonder if it would be as popular if the color of the meat was black. Naturally-raised, free-range chicken tends to have a darker color than the intensely-reared broilers most of us consumed, and I’ve noticed that the color alone tends to put people off. But that’s not even the kind of black meat I’m talking about. Kadaknath, a breed of chicken raised in several Indian states, has jet black feathers and skin, and truly dark meat that is allegedly of much higher quality than broilers.

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A Chinese woman was forced to lie to her grandmother, and even recruit someone to do the same, for 13 years, just to avoid breaking the old woman’s heart.

Chinese media recently featured the heartbreaking story of a young woman who decided to deceive her own grandmother for over a decade, knowing that the truth would be to much for her to bear. Cheng Jing, a 46-year-old woman from Xi’an, recently lost her grandmother, who died at the ripe old age of 100, but for the last 13 years of her life, she did everything in her power to make the old woman believe that her daughter was still alive. Jing’s mother had died in 2003, but knowing that the news would devastate her grandmother, she resorted to recruiting someone to imitate her mother’s voice over the phone to spare her granny the heartache.

Jing’s mother, Cheng Congrong, and her grandmother had always been very close, and even after Cheng developed lung cancer in 2003, she still called her mother as often as she could to let her know she was alright. Knowing that she didn’t have much to live, Congrong even recorded dozens of voice messages and asked her children to play them to their grandmother so she wouldn’t worry.

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DentalSlim Diet Control is a controversial weight loss device designed to allow wearers to open their mouths only about 2mm, thus making them unable to chew while making breathing and speaking possible.

Developed by scientists at University of Otago, in New Zealand, the DentalSlim Diet Control is an intra-oral device that can be attached to the wearer’s upper and lower back teeth by a dental professional. It features unique custom-manufactured locking bolts powered by magnets, which, when activated, only allow a mouth opening of about 2 mm, restricting the wearer to a liquid diet, while allowing them to breathe and speak normally. Apparently, the developers of the DentalSlim Diet Control believe that it can play a role in the fight against the global obesity epidemic.

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A Chinese LEGO enthusiast recently unveiled his most impressive project yet – a scale model of the Forbidden City in Beijing made out of 700,000 LEGO bricks.

The 4-meter-long by 2.4-meter-wide model of the Forbidden City was created by a Guangzhou-based LEGO fan named Li Zhining, over an entire year. It features all the elements of the world-famous palace complex, including the iconic Meridian Gate, the over 70 palaces and 9,000 houses of the three main halls of the Forbidden City, the moat and all the turrets. Even more impressive is the fact that the LEGO artist didn’t use any custom made bricks, instead relying only on his huge collection of standard pieces.

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‘Uglier and Uglier’, a controversial artwork that ranked photos and videos of 5,000 different real-life women from ugly to ugliest, was removed by a Shanghai-based gallery following public outcry.

Created by male Chinese artist Song Ta, ‘Uglier and Uglier’ featured photos and clips of thousands of women on a university campus ranked by how unattractive he found them. Song reportedly created the controversial exhibit in 2013 and showcased it in several art galleries since, but its latest outing at the OCAT Shanghai gallery was met with so much criticism from the public that it was eventually taken down. The fact that Song Ta once said that he and his assistants ranked the women depicted in his artwork from “forgivably ugly” to “unforgivably ugly” might have had something to do with people’s reaction to the exhibit…

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After losing his balance and falling off his bicycle, a bright Chinese engineer dedicated his spare time to designing and building a bike that not only self-balances, but also detects and avoids obstacles.

I never learned how to ride a bicycle, and I always wondered how people managed to keep their balance on those two thin wheels, but thanks to the efforts of Zhi Hui Jun, I may never have to. The talented engineer was fascinated by the self-driving bicycle built by scientists at Beijing Tsinghua University back in 2019, and after suffering a bicycle accident that left him with minor injuries to his face, the young engineer decided to build his own self-balancing bicycle.

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