The photo below may not seem very interesting at first glance, but the story behind it definitely is. That little round gadget is apparently a card scanner installed by a Chinese wife to make sure that her husband doesn’t come home later than 9 pm.

When their husbands don’t come straight home after work, some women start calling them every 10 minutes asking where they are, others text them insistently until they’ve had enough and come home, or tease them with a photo of a delicious dinner. But one Chinese wife decided to think outside the box and came up with a very practical solution – installing a card reader at the entrance of her home, which her husband must use every time he walks through the door.

Read More »

What was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives turned into a complete nightmare for a young couple in China, after it was revealed that the groom had hired 200 random people to act as his friends and relatives at the wedding.

The groom, known only by his surname, Wang, and his fiancee, Xiaoli, were supposed to tie the knot on Sunday, April 30th, during a big wedding banquet at a hotel in Xian, China’s Shaanxi Province. Everything was going according to plan up to the point when the family of the bride noticed that half of the tables reserved for the groom’s guests laid empty. Wang kept telling them that they were on their way, but the bride and her parents really became suspicious of him after talking to the few guests that were seated at his tables and noticing that while they all said that they were Wang’s friends, they couldn’t really say how they knew him.

Read More »

With millions of Chinese visiting the country’s sacred mountains every year, keeping them trash-free is incredibly difficult. Luckily, that’s where the Spiderman cleaners come in. These dedicated men an women risk their lives on a daily basis, rappelling down steep cliffs to reach plastic bottles, bags and various other garbage thrown there by uncivilized tourists.

Spiderman cleaners get their name from the dangerous nature of their job. Photos released in the media show them dangling thousands of feet above ground on the side of steep mountain cliffs, supported only by ropes or cables, as they attempt to collect hard-to-reach trash. In an attempt to highlight the danger of their work and make tourists think twice before littering, some of the cleaners actually exchanged their regular uniforms for Spiderman costumes. This has made them a hit with visitors, who often stop to watch these real-life versions of their favorite superhero descend into the abyss to pick up a piece of trash, rewarding them with applause and cheers when they complete their mission.

Read More »

Authorities in the Chinese city of Wuhan have recently equipped busy intersections with automatic pedestrian gates that only open when the traffic light turns green. The measure is aimed at preventing jaywalking, which has become a serious problem in many urban centers across China.

Chinese officials have been cracking down on jaywalkers for years. Jaywalking in the Asian country, often referred to as “Chinese-style street crossing”, often involves pedestrians completely ignoring traffic signals and crossing busy streets and roads, usually in large groups. This contributes heavily to traffic jams and bottlenecks in busy Chinese cities, and fines haven’t proven as effective a deterrent as authorities had hoped.

Read More »

Driven by a desire to improve the living conditions in his home, Huang Dafa, chief of Caowangba, a small village hidden deep in the mountains of Guizhou Province, China, spent 36 years digging a 10-kilometer-long water canal through three mountains.

The Chinese legend of Yu Gong speaks of an old man whose house was separated from the nearest village by two mountains. So he started digging away at them to make a direct route to the village. People mocked him for what they called a futile effort,  but he responded that while his descendants could dig for generations, the mountains couldn’t grow any higher. Moved by his determination, the gods moved the mountains, clearing the way for Yu Gong. Today, the saying “yu gong yi shan” – “the old man that could move mountains” – is used to describe ambition in the face on insurmountable odds.

But while the mythical Yu Gong was helped by divine intervention, Huang Dafa, village chief of Caowangba, in the mountains of Guizhou, could only rely on his will and the power of persuasion to build a long water channel through three karst mountains. His ambitious project began in 1959 and required 36 years of hard labor to complete. Today, his village is thriving thanks to constant running water, and he is celebrated as a real-life version of Yu Gong.

Read More »

Fed up with the constant noise made by his upstairs neighbors, a man in China got his revenge by giving them a taste of their own medicine. He bought a device known as a “building shaker” online and left it on for a whole weekend.

A resident of Xi’an, China’s Shaanxi province, the man – known only by his surname, Zhao – had complained that his upstairs neighbors’ son was making too much noise jumping around, and robbing him of his much needed rest and relaxation. He first tried reasoning with the family, politely asking them to keep the noise down at certain hours, but his requests fell on deaf ears and the constant banging continued.

Read More »

An ocean park in Wuhan, China, has come up with an original way to learn more about animals and makes a small profit in the process. For a fee of about $145, visitors can learn more about animals by cleaning their pens and preparing their feed.

The Wuhan Haichang Ocean Park recently made international headlines for a pretty bizarre service. In an effort to get people more interested in animals, it is allowing people to pay for the chance to get closer to them, scoop up their droppings, prepare their food and feed them. The offer is available only once a week, and applications and reservations have to be made a week in advance. It’s not free, though. People have to pay 998 yuan ($145) for the three-hour experience.

Read More »

Zheng Jiajia, a 31-year-old artificial intelligence expert from Hangzhou, China, recently made headlines after marrying 1-year-old Yingying, a “female” robot that he built himself.

Zheng graduated from Zhejiang University in 2011 with a master’s degree in artificial intelligence, and spent 3 years working for Chinese tech giant Huawei, before joining Hangzhou’s Dream Town, a base for internet and tech startups, to work on artificial intelligence. Last year, he started working on a smart humanoid robot that would end up becoming his wife.

Named Yingying, the female robot can allegedly say a few simple words, and is capable of recognizing Chinese characters and images. She weighs about 30 kilograms and is modeled according to the young engineer preferences in women.

Read More »

One of China’s newest pop sensations, a group called Acrush, puts a new twist on the concept of “boy band”, as its five members are in fact androgynous women.

Acrush is set to release their debut music video at the end of this month, but the band is already causing a stir online with its unique concept. The group was recently showcased to the public in a “Husband Exhibition” – an event organized by social media giant Tencent to promote pop stars who appear on its online streaming site – and the group’s popularity simply skyrocketed. With no single to their name yet, the girls already have 900,000 followers on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. That’s a pretty big deal, considering established stars like Katie Perry have around one million fans.

Read More »

They say claw machines are rigged to prevent users from actually catching a prize, but one Chinese man seems to have learned their secret. In just one year, Chen Zhitong has amassed a collection of over 15,000 plush toys from claw machines.

When we first heard about Chen Zhitong, about a year ago, he was making headlines in China for his ability to control claw machines in his home city of Xiamen. He had already collected over 3,000 toys at the time, which is a lot more than most people catch in a lifetime. But our boy has been very busy this past year, and now his collection of claw machine toys stands at a whopping 15,000. That has to be some kind of record!

Chen’s reputation as a claw machine master has now transcended Chinese borders, and he was recently featured in a short documentary by Great Big Story. In it, he talks about how he chooses the claw machines he plays at, his relationship with claw machine operators and what he does with all the toys he wins.

Read More »

Due to the unique topography and high construction density of Chongqing, one of the most populated cities in China, architects and city planners had to come up with a unique way of developing a vital monorail line. Their solution – having the train pass straight through a 19-floor apartment building.

With the Daba, Wushan, Wuling, and Dalou Mountains to its north, east and south, most of Chongqing’s terrain is made up of hill slopes. That coupled with the lack of space due to the high building density and a population of around 49 million people, makes working on infrastructure a real challenge for architects and city planners. In 2004, when the Rail Transit No.2 was approved, they only had two choices – either tear down the whole apartment building to make room for the monorail, or clear up two floors and make a tunnel, so the train can pass through it. As unconventional as it seems, experts went for the second option, and 13 years later they are still convinced it was the right thing to do.

Read More »

To combat the rampant toilet paper theft in public toilets, local authorities in Beijing, China, have begun installing high-tech facial scanners that prevent users from taking any more toilet paper if they show up again within a certain period of time.

The public toilets at the Temple of Heaven, one of the most popular tourist attraction in the Chinese capital, used to be a hotbed of toilet paper theft. Sick of wasting huge amount of money on thousands of rolls of paper every month, local authorities recently replaced the old dispensers with high-tech ones with incorporated facial scanning technology. Now, to receive a 60-cm-long sheet of toilet paper, users must stand in front of the machine to have their face scanned and stored in a temporary data base. If they return in less than nine minutes from their previous visit, the machine will remember them and will not dispense anymore toilet paper.

Read More »

Proposing with a diamond ring is nice, but it’s been done millions of times, so, in a n effort to be more original, a Chinese man decided to pop the big question to his sweetheart with a different kind of rock – a 33-tonne “meteorite”.

Liu Fei, a young man from Urumqi, China, recently made national headlines after proposing to his girlfriend with a large boulder that he claimed was a “33-tonne meteorite”. On March 14, Liu took his beloved to a public square, where he got down on one knee in a heart made of rose petals and asked her to marry him. As soon as she answered “yes”, a couple of the man’s friends unveiled a strange boulder strategically placed in the middle of the square. Apparently, this wasn’t just any rock, but a meteorite that Liu had bought for 1 million yuan ($145,000), money he had originally saved for a new apartment.

Read More »

A Buddhist nun has melted the hearts of millions of Chinese after it was revealed that she has adopted and raised over 30 girls abandoned at the gate of her temple over the last 37 years.

Master nun Changmiao, who joined the Buddhist Hailian Temple, in Ningdu, when she was 15 years old, adopted her first daughter in 1980, when she found her abandoned on the side of the road outside her temple. The infant had ants crawling all over her body, and while curious onlookers gathered to see her, none of them were willing to do anything to help. So Changmiao decided to take her in and raise the girl as her own. Little did she know that this was only the first of many daughters, all of them rescued.

Read More »

A few years ago, most of the 2,000 or so villagers in Donggaozhuang, northern China, were struggling to put food on the table by growing wheat and corn. Now, dozens of them are millionaires and more on well on their way of making six-figure fortunes after switching to selling yarn online.

Donggaozhuang’s success story started with the idea of one villager, who set up an e-shop on Taobao, China’s largest online commerce platform, to sell yarn. Things went way better than he had anticipated, and in just three months, he made a profit of $2,900, a small fortune, considering that the highest minimum wage in China is currently around $330 per month. Word of his booming business spread like wildfire around Donggaozhuang, and the village elders soon approached the man, asking him to teach other members of the community how to set up their own online businesses.

Since yarn had worked so well for Donggaozhuang’s first online entrepreneur, everyone followed in his footsteps and they all started making money. Realizing the potential of their businesses, many sold their lands and put their farming days behind them to focus solely on their e-shops. They started buying wool, turning it into yarn and selling that on Taobao.

Read More »