Xiao Wang was only 17 years old when he decided to sell one of his kidneys in order to buy the iPhone 4 he couldn’t otherwise afford. After the operation Wang was told he was going to have a normal life with just one kidney, but almost eight years on, the 24-year-old is permanently disabled and dependent on dialysis.

Back in 2011, the iPhone 4 was Apple’s flagship smartphone and a status symbol at Xiao Wang’s school in Chengzhou, China. However, he came from a poor family who couldn’t afford to buy him the trendy gadget, so he decided to sell one of his healthy organs in order to get his hands on enough money to buy the coveted device. With help from a middleman, Wang got in touch with shady characters who specialized in trading organs on the black market and agreed to sell one of his kidneys for 22,000 yuan ($3,200), more than enough to buy the iPhone 4 he so badly desired. Unfortunately, this foolish decision would completely ruin his life.

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A Chinese man wound up with two large “play” triangles shaved into his new hairdo after asking his hairstylist to use a paused video on his phone as inspiration for the haircut.

It’s not uncommon for people to show their barber photos of haircuts they’d like to try, but one man in China made the mistake of using a paused video on his phone as inspiration for his hairdo, and the detail-oriented hairstylist ended up incorporating the “play” symbol into the haircut as well. To be fair, the video had been paused at just the right moment and the large triangular icon on the screen looked like it was actually part of the hairdo. What are the odds of that happening, I wonder?

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A Chinese man was recently arrested and charged with fraud for impersonating a police officer. He’s definitely not the first person to do that, but what makes his case special is that he managed to convince everyone around him that he was a real police officer for 12 years.

41-year-old Wang Feng had always wanted to be a police officer, but never actually trained or studied to become one. That didn’t stop him from pretending to be one for over a decade, though. It all started in 2006, when Wang’s brother was involved in a debt dispute case and needed a lawyer. To make sure that his brother’s counsel gave 100% in court, Wang met with the man and pretended to be a police officer at the Haiyan Baibu Police Station, in Baibu Town, China’s Zhejiang Province. The ruse actually worked, which made Wang Feng want to try it on others as well. Soon, he started telling friends and acquaintances that he had become a police officer, bought a fake uniform, handcuffs, and even had a fake ID done.

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Apples are generally red, green, yellow or a combination of the three, but if the right geographical conditions are met, they can apparently grow dark purple, almost black, as well. These rare apples are called Black Diamond and they are currently only grown in the mountains of Tibet.

Black Diamond apples are a breed of Hua Niu apples (also known as Chinese Red Delicious) that get their unique dark purple color from the geographical conditions of Nyingchi, in the Tibet Autonomous Region. The 50-hectare orchard set up her by Chinese company Dandong Tianluo Sheng Nong E-Commerce Trade Co., Ltd. has an elevation of 3100 meters above sea level, making it the ideal place to grow these intriguing fruit. The temperature differences between day and night are significant, and the fruits get a lot of sunlight and ultraviolet light which causes their skin to go from the characteristic deep red of Hua Niu apples, to dark purple.

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Imagine working as a shop assistant at a jewelry store and having to jump over the glass counter to stop a potential client who’s sprinting towards the door with an expensive necklace around their neck. You’re about to lay your hands on them when they abruptly stop in front of the mirror to admire the jewelry, as if they had never planned to run off with it. That’s the world Chinese shop assistants are living in these days, because of a viral jewelry-stealing prank trend.

Chinese social media has been flooded with videos of people putting on expensive jewelry at jewelry stores and then pretending to run out only to stop in front of a mirror, while an accomplice films the poor shop assistants desperate attempts to stop the apparent theft. Some will leap over the glass counters, others will try to go around them, but they all embarrassingly turn around the moment they realize the potential client’s intentions. It’s funny to watch, I will say that, but you kind of feel bad for the poor jewelers at the same time.

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Looking at the artworks bellow, you could swear they the charcoal drawings of a talented artist, but they’re actually not drawings at all, but hair paintings, and they’re hand-made not by an artist, but a skilled hairdresser.

Allen Chen, who works as a hairdresser at the XB Hair Professional salon in Changhua, China, recently became an internet sensation in his home country, after photos and videos of his incredibly detailed hair paintings went viral online. His latest masterpiece, a “hairy” portrayal of Romance of the Three Kingdoms heroes Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fey has been massively shared on Weibo, and videos of the young hairdresser carefully arranging the hair trimming to create the three characters have already been viewed millions of times. And looking at the quality of these artworks, it’s easy to see why everyone is so impressed by Allen’s talent.

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It turns out that smelling your own socks is not only gross but potentially deadly. A Chinese man was recently hospitalized with a severe pulmonary fungal infection, which he allegedly developed by constantly sniffing his used socks.

When he was brought in to the No 909 Hospital in Zhangzhou, China’s Fujian Province, the 37-year-old man, surnamed Peng, complained of chest pain and frequent coughing. An X-ray showed that he was suffering from a severe lung infection, and subsequent tests revealed that it had been caused by a bacteria typically found in used footwear. After being questioned by his doctors, Peng admitted that he had long developed a habit of sniffing his dirty socks every day after coming home from work, before throwing them in the laundry basket.

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Mi Youren, a 68-year-old pensioner from Jinan, China, loves nothing more than to put on a tight leopard costume complete with tail and pointy ears, and practice a fitness routine based on he created himself based on the movements of the athletic feline.

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A Chinese man has been making national headlines after it was revealed that he has been waiting in a bookstore in Beijing for over 50 days hoping to meet a girl he has “fallen in love with” after making eye-contact for 10 seconds.

To say that this 26-year-old man is a firm believer in love at first sight would be an understatement. He is so convinced that the woman he saw in a popular Beijing bookstore back in September is the girl of his dreams that he quit his job and has been staying in the bookshop every day from 11am to 7pm, hoping to meet her again so he can tell her how he feels. To improve his chances of bumping into the mystery woman again, the man, surnamed Sun, has been passing out hand-drawn sketches of her to other bookstore visitors, and recently tried to sue her for emotional distress, even though he doesn’t even know her name.

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A Chinese mother allegedly faked the kidnapping of her 11-year-old son as a way of testing whether her husband really cared about her and their child.

The boy’s mother, a 33-year-old woman named Chen, filed a fake missing persons report in Yueqing City, on Friday. She told police that her son had last been seen near his school and gave them a description of his clothes. The case was declared a top priority and huge resources were allocated to an ample search operation in Yueqing and neighboring Wenzhou. The kidnapping attracted national attention, particularly because of the 500,000 yuan ($72,000) reward offered by the family for any information about the boy’s whereabouts, and online articles about his disappearance were read hundreds of millions of times just on social media platform Weibo. Everyone was fearing the worst, but it turned out that 11-year-old Huang had been safe and sound in the care of a relative all along.

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A Chinese real-estate company has been accused of taking a wrong approach to encouraging its employees to exercise. Workers claim that they have been fined 0.01 yuan for every step they failed to take to meet their monthly target of 180,000 steps.

Taking a set number of steps every day has become a big deal in China. Some health insurers use apps to track their clients’ daily walks, offering discounts on future plans if they meet their goals, and many schools reportedly require students to walk/exercise every day and routinely check the pedometer apps on their phones to ensure that they comply. Even private companies have jumped on the walking bandwagon, encouraging their workers to take a set number of steps per month, but if one recent news report is to be believed, some employers are taking things too far, opting to fine those who fail to reach the required target.

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A primary school teacher in China was recently dismissed for discriminating against a child suffering from cancer, by making him sit alone at the back of the class and not allowing him to take exams like everyone else.

The languages teacher is said to have complained about the boy ever since he transferred to the Liancheng Primary School, in Quanzhou, Fujian province, in September, in order to be closer to his parents while receiving chemotherapy treatment for Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He reportedly thought that the child’s condition could be contagious, and he wasn’t the only one, as Chinese media reports that several children were withdrawn from the school following the sick 13-year-old’s transfer. Since then, he had gone out of his way to make the boy, named only as Zhou feel like an outcast, making him sit all by himself at the back of the class and even forbidding him to take exams.

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Seeing Zhang Ziyu towering over her classmates at the Cultural East Road Primary School, in Jinan, China, it’s hard to believe that they are all in the sixth grade. The 11-year-old already measures 6ft 7in (210 cm), and many believe she is the tallest girl in the world.

Zhang’s parents are both former professional basketball players, and they are both over 2 meters tall, so it’s pretty clear that genetics played an important role in her physical development, but reaching 210 cm by age 11 is still very unusual. Zhang has always been taller than all the other children, and one of her colleagues remembers that in the first grade, she already stood at 1.6m (5ft 3in) tall. That’s already considerably taller than the average Chinese sixth-grade girl (4ft 6in or 1.38m).

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A young university student who ate only instant noodles for three weeks straight in order to save money for Singles Day – China’s version of Black Friday – ended spending all of her savings on medical bills after her unusual diet made her sick.

Instant noodles are standard fare for many university students. They’re cheap, easy to cook and they fill your stomach, but they’re definitely not the most nutritious meal. One young woman recently learned the hard way that surviving on instant noodles alone is not the smartest thing you can do, even if it means saving some money in the short run.

Hong Jia first made news headlines in China at the start of November, when it was revealed that she had been eating only instant noodles since October 15, in order to save a bit of money for Singles Day, the largest online and offline shopping day in the world. In a viral Pear video, Jia said that she had managed to save 749 yuan ($108) by switching to the ultra cheap diet, money that she planned to spend on the November 11 shopping extravaganza.

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A Changsha man recently made news headlines in China after it was reported that he became hooked on cold medication 10 years ago and has taken over 30,000 pills since then just to satisfy his addiction.

The 48-year-old man, surnamed Wang, was featured in a viral Pear video in which he explains that he first bought an unspecified brand of cold medicine about a decade ago, to treat a headache. He took a couple of them and they were very effective, so every time he felt even a slight discomfort he always popped some more pills, which made him feel a lot better. The problem was that in time, he had to increase the dose to get the same results, and he reached a point where he took between 8 to 12 of these pills every day just to function normally. In recent years, the man’s addiction to the pills had gotten so bad that if he went too long without taking some, he would start to get melancholic, then become inexplicably irritated. He also experienced physical symptoms, like headaches and a general feeling of discomfort.

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