We thought Indian millionaire Bhanwarlal Raghunath – who gave up his fortune to become a monk – was one of a kind, but we were wrong. Meet Liu Jingchong, a rich Chinese businessman who has also renounced his wealth for monkhood.

Jingchong, 39, was bitten by the spiritual bug in 2012, after a freak car accident. “It is true that I earned a lot of money and I can’t say I hated my life,” he told the media. “I would say that I even loved it, but all that changed when friends of mine and I had a car accident in a remote part of the country in northwestern China’s Qinghai province.”

“We needed to get a new car and not all of us were fit to travel immediately,” Jingchong recalled. “But as I was relatively okay, I stayed in a hotel where about the only thing to do was read a book on Buddhism. I have to say it changed my life.”

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30-year-old Liu Haibin is being hailed as the world’s coolest dad after he built an innovative seesaw that allows him to play with his toddler son who lives with his mother over 700 miles away.

While Chinese media is referring to Liu’s invention as the ‘world’s longest seesaw’, in reality, it consists of two identical seesaws equipped with motion sensors. One is placed in Tengzhou City, where Liu’s wife and eight-month-old son live. The other is with Liu, who lives in Xiamen City, 730 miles away. Through wireless internet signals and remote synchronization sensor data, the seesaws are perfectly synchronized. HD monitors on both seesaws enable father and son to see and interact with each other as they play.

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A peculiar outdoor bookstore recently opened in Nanjing, China. There is no cashier desk and no working staff to keep an eye on the books. Instead, visitors are invited to peruse the reading material on offer and pay whatever they want for books by dropping the money in a lock-box.

Organizers say the aptly named Honesty Bookstore is a social experiment meant to raise awareness of honesty and integrity. Believe it or not, so far, people have been doing the right thing. With no staff around, there is absolutely nothing stopping people from just taking the books they like and leaving without paying anything for them. Well, nothing but their conscience, that is. According to several news reports from China, people have actually been dropping money inside the box of their own free will, and Honesty Bookstore organizers claim that the raised money is enough to cover costs.

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3D-printed homes aren’t exactly new, but the rapid progress made in this new industry never cease to amaze us here at Oddity Central. Earlier this year we wrote about a Chinese company that used a specially designed 3D printer to create large ec0-friendly housing in record time. Another construction company has now perfected the process, making it possible to assemble a fully functional home in just three hours!

The revolutionary new technology was developed by Zhuoda Group, in Xi’an, central China. On July 17, they put up a two-storey sample villa built from pre-constructed components that were printed in a factory and later lifted into place using a crane. The instant villas cost only about 3,500 yuan ($564) per square meter, which is far lower than the current industry standard.

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Chinese surgeons recently performed a bizarre surgery in order to save a man’s severed hand. They grafted it on to his ankle for a month, before reattaching it to his arm!

The innovative surgery was carried out on factory worker Zhou, from Changsha, China’s Hunan province. Zhou’s left hand was accidentally severed from his arm during an accident involving a spinning blade machine. He was immediately rushed to Xiangya Hospital, where Dr. Tang Juyu and his team realised that the damaged nerves and tendons needed time to heal. If they tried to attach the hand to his arm immediately, its cells would die from lack of blood supply.

“Under normal temperatures, a severed finger needs to resume blood supply within 10 hours, but that time is even shorter for a separated limb,” Tang explained. “If a limb is short of blood for too long, its tissues die and it will be unsalvageable.” Read More »

Chen Yinxi, a 27-year-old motorist from China, stole the show at the 2015 Hainan International Automotive Industry Exhibition, last week, with an impressive-looking futuristic supercar he built by himself, from scratch.

Majoring in automobile engineering, Chen has always dreamed of doing car design, and spent two years studying it in school. However, his parents always had other plans – their son was to work in the family factory, which he will one day inherit from his father. They encouraged him to drop out of college to work at the factory, but have remained supportive of him working on car design as a hobby. Now that the young motorist has gained international attention for building an original-looking supercar by himself, their plans may have to change.

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A video of a piece of beef twitching as if it were alive has been doing the rounds online for the last two weeks creeping out viewers and even turning some of them into vegetarians.

Chinese meat has been getting a lot of news coverage lately. Just last week we reported about the now-famous “zombie meat” – cheap meat as old as 40 years smuggled into the country and sold to small restaurants – and these days everyone’s talking about “Frankenstein meat”. Luckily, this one is actually safe for human consumption, although it looks arguably creepier than zombie meat.

So what’s this all about, then? Around two weeks ago, Cheng Tan, a woman from Shandong Province, China, bought a piece of fresh meat, and just as she was getting ready to slice it on her kitchen table, she noticed it was moving. She quickly reached for her smartphone, recorded a video of the creepy twitching meat and posted it online. The minute-long clip was viewed tens of millions of times on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter and eventually found its way onto Western websites, where it went viral again.

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After plastic rice, concrete-filled walnuts, and beef flavored pork, the latest food scandal in China involves expired meat that’s at least 30 to 40 years old!

Chinese food safety officials have seized over 100,000 tons of meat, worth 3 billion Yuan ($484 million), including pig trotters from the 1970s and chicken wings from the 1980s. As the news went viral online, netizens coined the term ‘zombie meat’ to refer to the expired, oxidized meat.

800 tons of illegal meat were seized from Hunan province alone, worth an eye-watering 10 million yuan – one of the largest food safety hauls in recent years. 20 illegal gangs have been cracked down on and 22 people arrested, including two ring leaders.

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This heartwarming tale from Hefei, in East China, proves that true friendship has the power to transcend death. For the past 11 years, Sheng Ru-zhi, a lonely mother who lost her son to leukemia, has been looked after by seven of his friends!

It all started in 2001, when Zhang Kai, a teenager, was diagnosed with the deadly disease. Seven of his closest friends from school constantly visited Zhang at his home, taking care of both mother and son. When Zhang passed away in 2004, the devastated Sheng thought she’d have to spend the rest of her life in solitude. But the seven friends had other plans. They continued to visit her as usual, caring for her as Zhang would have.

Sheng still remembers the moment she realised she wasn’t going to spend her life alone after all. “I was alone at the time,” she recalled. “They came into my house and filled it with life again.”

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Li Rongjun, an aspiring architect from China, has built himself an spectacular office. In a bid to showcase his mad construction skills, he’s used 8,500 beer bottles to make the entire upper floor of a two-storey building!

The 300-square foot office, located in Chongqing city, consists of 40 layers of bottles that Li and his father laid out over four months. Pictures show how he cleverly stacked the bottles in rows with the bottoms facing inward sand filling the gaps with stones and cement.

“I wanted to build an artistic and usable office,” said Li, who graduated from the Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology this year. “This building is also my calling card for my future business plans. It will allow investors to see my products in real life and see my talent.”

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A 65-year-old dog lover from China, has gone to great lengths to save as many dogs as she possibly could from being eaten during this year’s Yulin Dog Meat Festival. She managed to pay around $1,000 for the release of 100 otherwise doomed canines. It may not sound like much, but the media attention her actions got in international media also helped raise awareness about the cruel festival, thus increasing the chances of it being banned in the near future.

Yang Xiaoyun, a retired school teacher from Tianjin, China, traveled 1,500 miles from her home to the city of Yulin, to save scores of dogs from being slaughtered and eaten during the Dog Meat Festival. Photos shared on Chinese internet portal Netease show the 65-year-old woman walking through a market where dogs were kept in cages and paying for various sums of money for their release. Reports say she ended up paying 7,000 yuan ($1,000) to save 100 dogs.

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A major food safety scandal involving fake rice recently rocked China; news reports suggested that the grains were made by mixing potatoes with industrial synthetic resin. There were also rumors of the “cheap but profitable” rice being exported to other Asian countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and India.

The fake grains supposedly cannot be distinguished from natural rice when raw. The only way to identify plastic rice is by cooking it – it remains hard and is difficult to digest. One publication explained that soup cooked with plastic rice will form a plastic film over the top, which burns when heated.

Health experts are warning people that these grains, if consumed, could wreak havoc on the digestive system. According to an official from the Chinese Restaurant Association, eating three bowls of plastic rice would equal consuming one plastic bag!

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Let’s face it: fire drills are boring and they do nothing to prepare you for a real disaster. Recognising the need for some serious training, a school in China recently collaborated with the local fire department to take traditional fire drills to the next level.

During the mandatory annual event hosted by Nanhu Vocational School, in Hongkou District, Shanghai, students had to evacuate the building at the sound of a bell. But they also had to run through a series of burning doorways with napkins over their mouths, to avoid smoke inhalation. After crossing the obstacles, the students used fire extinguishers to put off the flames. Over 1,000 students from different grades attended the course.

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Meet Li Li Juan, a former millionaire whose benevolent spirit led her to bankruptcy. The 47-year-old, from northern China’s Hebei Province, has adopted 72 abandoned children over the course of 19 years. She spent all her money caring for them, and is now facing a huge debt of over two million yuan.

Li became rich during the 1980s, earning huge profits from her garments business and her investments in iron ore mining. It was around this time that she started taking in sick and disabled children who were abandoned by their parents, and orphaned children whose parents had died in coal mine disasters. She used her two sources of income to provide for all her adopted children.

It was all smooth sailing for a few years, but as luck would have it, hard times fell upon Li in 2008. Her mine was shut down due to urban developments, cutting down a major source of her income. But she continued to care for the children by selling off all her properties and valuables, one at a time.

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After his divorce, Chinese farmer Xu Wenyi longed for a means to escape reality. So he set out on an epic challenge – to dig his own cave dwelling in the side of a hill. It was back-breaking work, but he kept at it for six long years, until his cave home was finally ready.

Xu, now 57, has been living in his cave for over a decade. Located in a mountain in Xiangtan County, in China’s Hunan Province, it measures 100 ft deep and 13 ft wide. In fact, it’s more like a tiny apartment, complete with concrete-reinforced walls and a front door. The interiors are pretty neat too, with an 85-square foot living room and a stone kitchen. Xu has even dug out alcoves in the walls, to use as shelves for his belongings. He has a chicken coop inside, and he’s made himself a garden of pine and cypress trees outside.

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