The untimely death of a 20-year-old video game streamer from China who used to play an insanely popular online game for 9 hours straight every night recently brought the addictive nature of video games into debate.

“Lonely King” was one of the most successful streamers of “King of Glory”, an incredibly successful mobile game with 200 million monthly active players. The 20-year-old reportedly had over 170,000 fans on his streaming platform, and used to showcase his gaming sessions for many hours on end, every single day. Lonely King’s last live playing session occurred on November 2nd, after which he simply disappeared. Used to watching his live streams at least once every 24 hours, Lonely King’s fans started speculating about his well-being several days after noticing his continued absence. Many of them anticipated that he might have succumbed to exhaustion, seeing as he had drastically altered his video game playing schedule – streaming from midnight to 9 in the morning, every night – since July.

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Four sophomore students at the University of Hefei, in eastern China, recently proved that you don’t have to spend a small fortune on a designer dress to look stunning. You can make it yourself, for free, using only plant leaves.

Photos of the four students’ stunning leaf dress have been doing the rounds on Chinese social media for about a week, and people still can’t stop gushing over them. And who can blame them, really? Just take a look at what these kids were able to do with about 6,000 leaves, some thread and mountains of patience.

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In an attempt to tackle obesity on its campus, a university in Jiangsu, China, is offering overweight students the chance to enroll in a special weight-loss program, where they will receive their grades based on how much weight they shed and on how well they do in class.

Zhou Quanfu, a lecturer at the Nanjing Agriculture University, came up with the idea for the accredited weight loss program after learning that most of his overweight students didn’t exercise because they thought it was pointless. So he decided to motivate them by having their grades depend more on their physical shape than on their actual performance in school. Sixty per cent of each student’s grade is determined by how much weight they lose in a set period of time, with their curricular activity only accounting for 40 percent of the total score. Students enrolled in the program have to lose at least 7 percent of their original weight by the end of the semester in order to receive full grades.

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Sick of listening to his lazy son-in-law complaining about how hard it was to climb the stairs to his 6th floor apartment, a man in Chongqing, China, built a private elevator that only goes up to his apartment.

The man, surnamed Xong, has been living in the Tongliang District apartment building for decades, but never complained about having to walk up to his apartment every day. But when his son-in-law moved in, he had trouble getting used to the daily climb, and always complained about how exhausted he was after walking up the stairs. Tired of his constant wining, Xong decided to do something about it.

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Getting a divorce is never easy for anyone involved, but it is particularly difficult at the Yibin People’s Court, in China’s Sichuan Province, where one magistrate recently implemented a divorce exam that both the husband and the wife must fail in order for their divorce application to be approved.

The divorce exam is the brainchild of Wang Shiyu, a judge at the People’s Court of Yibin County, who, after noticing that divorces accounted for an alarmingly large percentage of the court’s cases, decided to do something about it. His intention was to make couples think twice before ending their marriage, and also give them an opportunity to reminisce the good times they had together. So he came up with a series of questions for both husband and wife, which they must answer separately. If they score under 60, Wang approves their divorce application, if not, well, they have to keep working on their marriage, whether they like it or not.

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Zhou Yusong is known as the “Guardian of Dogs” in his home city of Zhengzhou, China’s Henan Province. The kindhearted man has spent the last 8 years of his life rescuing stray dogs and offering them a home at  his animal protection center.

It all started in 2008, when Zhou Yusong, when he noticed an injured stray dog by the side of a road in Zhengzhou. It had been hit by a car and was fighting for his life, but everyone just ignored it. Unable to do the same, he picked up the canine and took it to a nearby pet hospital. After saving the animal’s life, he took it to a dog shelter, as he had no way of taking care of it himself, in his small apartment. Shocked by the large number of stray dogs already at the shelter, he became more involved in trying to make their lives easier, and started donating 200 yuan ($30) every month, for the animal’s food and medical treatments.

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Cricket fighting has been popular in China for thousands of years, and with the country in full economic boom, fans of the “sport” are investing more money into it than ever before. One town in particular has built an entire industry around the genetically-superior crickets living in the surrounding fields, and for good reason, as the best specimens can reportedly sell for up to 50,000 yuan ($7,661).

The tradition of cricket fighting can be traced back to the Tang dynasty (618-904), and the crickets found in the fields around the town of Sidian, in China’s Shandong province, have long been renowned for their large size and aggressiveness, both very important features among enthusiasts of the sport. It is said that several of China’s emperors favored Sidian’s crickets for their high win rate, and today’s rich spend absurd amounts of money for exceptional specimens that can give them an edge against their rivals.

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65-year-old Zhang Kehua, a retired mason from Qianjiang, China, has a very unique skill – he can assemble realistic Chinese vases out of thousands of folded plastic playing cards.

We’ve seen people create all kinds of impressive structures by expertly stacking playing cards, but what Zhang Kehua does is on a whole other level. The Chinese retiree has taught himself several methods of folding plastic playing cards so that they can be assembled into life-size vases that even feature traditional decorative patterns. His creations are so flawless that seen from a far, you could swear that they are made of porcelain.

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Bai Yan, a kindhearted police dog handler from Hangzhou, recently melted the hearts of millions of Chinese after it was reported that he had spent the last 7 years and around 1 million yuan ($150,000) on a retirement home for police dogs, where his former “comrades in arms” could live out their golden years in peace.

55-year-old Bai has been working as a police dog handler since 2004, during which time he has trained around 30 canines. Spending so much time with the animals, he became very attached to them, and having seen how some retired police dogs ended up, he knew he had to do something about it. The trainer recently told Chinese media that one of the things that convinced him to open a retirement home for police dogs was seeing  an old police dog who had been completely neglected by his new owner lying in the dirt with a chain around its neck and a bowl of spoiled food in front of him. Retired police dogs are usually put up for adoption with the general public, and there is very little vetting of potential owners.

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Bai Shufang, a doctor at a vitiligo hospital in Beijing, China, has been dressing up as a traditional opera character, complete with elaborate facial makeup, as a way to make her patients feel more relaxed.

After noticing that many of her patients had trouble opening up to her about their condition, which affected her ability to prescribe the best treatment for them, Chinese dermatologist Bai Shufang decided to help them relax by adopting a different persona. Many people are uncomfortable and tense around doctors, so she thought that by radically changing her appearance, she should help them get over their nerves. For the past couple of weeks, Bai Shufang has been spending about an hour every morning, dressing up as a Chinese opera performer, and putting up layers of thick traditional makeup.

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A top-tier Chinese football team recently painted their whole stadium from their traditional color, blue, to bright gold, in order to change their luck. It may sound stupid, but they don’t care, because it actually worked!

Last month, after a dismal run that saw their team win a single home game in four months, the Guangzhou R&F football club made the desperate decision to repaint the whole stadium and surrounding facility gold, to improve their feng shui. The decision sounds even crazier if you consider that they had just renovated the stadium last year, painting the whole thing blue, to match their club colors. But the team had only won a single match on home turf since March 12, and they had run out of people and things to blame for their results, so, in desperation, management decided to follow the teachings of feng shui. They chose gold, because it apparently symbolizes completeness and fulfillment.

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A 44-year-old man from Quzhou, China’s Zhejiang province, was recently hospitalized with severe kidney problems, after eating a whopping 54 ice creams in one sitting, and washing them down with ice water.

The man, surnamed Zheng, was at his home, on July 15, when he began to feel the effects of the heatwaves that have been sweeping China for the last few weeks. Tired and dehydrated after a hot day, Zheng went to his refrigerator and grabbed an ice cream to cool off. Problem was that that first ice-cream only made him crave another, and then another, so he kept eating them until he went through all the 54 frozen treats he had in his fridge. I’ve never head of anyone having that many ice-creams in their home, but apparently this guy did.

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The sight of a single bee buzzing around is enough to drive some people into a frenzy, but one family in China has somehow been living with an entire beehive in their living room for 12 years. They even collect the honey from it and sell it for a small profit.

Remember the BEEcosystem, that observational beehive that lets you keep bees inside your home as pets? Well, it turns out you don’t need it. You can just let bees build their own beehive on your furniture and let them fly around freely. It sounds crazy, but one family in China is proof that it can be done, and not just for a few days or weeks, but over a decade.

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The raincoat and the umbrella have been the staples of rainwear for decades, probably even centuries, but Chinese designers are attempting to challenge that with a bizarre new product currently called an “umbrella raincoat”.

As the name suggests, this innovative rainwear accessory combines the raincoat and the umbrella with questionable results. For starters, it looks kind of ridiculous, and sellers on Chinese websites like Aliexpress actually list this fact as the only downside of the product. They actually phrase it a little differently – “You will get 100% rate of second glances” – but that’s just a fancy way of saying it looks weird. Also, like the good ol’ umbrella, it only shields your upper body from the rain, with the lower torso and legs being almost completely exposed. On the upside, it does free up both your hands, which is apparently the main advantage of wearing an umbrella raincoat. Read More »

Yu Ermei, and 86-year-old woman from Jingdezhen, Eastern China, has spent around $900,000 and five years of her life building a “palace” completely decorated with ceramic pieces. Most people consider her insane for spending so much time and money on this project, but she says that her life would be incomplete without it.

When Yu came up with the idea for her unique porcelain palace, six years ago, her family thought she had become senile, but she tried to explain that this was her life’s dream. Jingdezhen is considered “China’s porcelain capital” and having lived here since age 12, the woman wanted to leave something behind in honor of the city that had shaped her existence. She had worked in the ceramics business for most of her life, first as an apprentice in a porcelain workshop, then as a worker in two state-owned factories, before gaining enough experience to open her own kiln and porcelain factory, which ended up making her a sizable fortune. This palace would be her way of giving back to Jingdezhen and a tribute to ceramics.

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