China's Weather Modification Office: A Government Entity That Controls The Weather
Remember the old saying that everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it? Well, not China! The country has a Weather Modification Office that aims to control the weather:
Chinese meteorologists say they brought about Beijing’s earliest snowfall in a decade, after seeding rain clouds with silver iodide to ease a drought.
The Weather Modification Office sprayed clouds with 186 doses of the chemical to bring rain for the wheat crop, the Beijing Evening News said.
But the arrival of a cold front caused heavy snow to fall, disrupting road, rail and air travel.
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Apology Form for Drunkeness
Letters of Note has a form letter from the 9th century found in western China produced by the Dunhuang Bureau of Etiquette. They had insisted officials issue letters of apology to dinner hosts after any embarrassing drunken escapades. The offender was supposed to recopy the characters in their own hand while inserting the recipient’s name. The translation:
Yesterday, having drunk too much, I was intoxicated as to pass all bounds; but none of the rude and coarse language I used was uttered in a conscious state. The next morning, after hearing others speak on the subject, I realised what had happened, whereupon I was overwhelmed with confusion and ready to sink into the earth with shame.
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The Opium Museum
The Opium Museum is, at the heart, about the trade in rare antiques, since opium smoking paraphernalia was outlawed. Still, there are pages and pages of the history of opium and its use in countries all over the world, with many historical photographs.
Beginning in the 18th century, opium accompanied the Chinese diaspora: first to the Chinese quarters of Asian cities, and later to the Chinatowns of the West, particularly North America, where opium smoking in the Chinese manner and with Chinese-made paraphernalia became fashionable among non-Chinese.
Once the drug was banned and its paraphernalia outlawed, these illicit items were heaped into piles and burned in public bonfires. From Shanghai to Saigon to San Francisco, the means to smoke opium were destroyed along with the drug itself. So few examples of these relics remain that most experts on Chinese art are blithely unaware of just how sumptuous and opulent this art form had become during its heyday.
For serious collectors, there is information on how to identify genuine opium tools and have them appraised. Link -via Metafilter
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The World’s Largest Shopping Mall
The largest shopping mall in the world is no longer the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. The South China Mall near Guangzhou, China is twice as big! This is not a success story; there are only about a dozen stores open in the giant facility. However, because the mall is considered “too big to fail”, it is kept open with a staff working every day. The series POV tells the story in a 13 minute video. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
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China’s 60th Anniversary Parade
The People’s Republic of China was founded on October 1st, 1949. To celebrate the 60th anniversary, a three-hour parade was held in Beijing. This video by Dan Chung shows the highlights in both time-lapse and slow motion. -via reddit
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Dwarf Village is a Theme Park
120 little people live in a village near Kunming, China. The village was set up to protect the dwarves from discrimination. You can’t live there if you are over 4 feet 3 inches tall.
Now the group has turned itself into a tourist attraction by building mushroom houses and living and dressing like fairy tale characters.
“As small people we are used to being pushed around and exploited by big people. But here there aren’t any big people and everything we do is for us,” said spokesman Fu Tien.
You have to wonder if there are exceptions to the community rules for normal sized children of the current residents when they pass the height limit. Link
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Chinese Government Covered a Bridge in Butter to Fight Suicides
Butter … is there anything it can’t do? Add this to the long list of the awesome things butter can do: in China, they use it to prevent suicides!
Government officials in south-east China have ordered workers to cover a 1,000 ft long steel bridge in butter to prevent citizens from using it to attempt suicide.
All the climbable surfaces on the structure in Guangzhou have been covered in greasy fat to put an end to the spate of people threatening to jump from it, The Sun reports.
Government spokesman Shiu Liang said: "We tried employing guards at both ends but that didn’t work – and we put up special fences and notices asking people not to commit suicide here.
"None of it worked – and so now we have put butter over the bridge and it has worked very well. Nobody can get up there and nobody who tries ever falls."
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Snake Found with a Foot
A 16-inch snake was killed at a home in China and then found to have a foot growing out of its body! 66-year-old Dean Qiongxiu said she awoke to find the reptile clinging to a wall in her bedroom. She killed the snake with a shoe and when she saw the clawed foot, she put the body in alcohol to preserve it. It was taken to the Life Sciences Department at China’s West Normal University in Nanchang for study.
Snake expert Long Shuai said: “It is truly shocking but we won’t know the cause until we’ve conducted an autopsy.”
Link -via the Presurfer
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Hangin' Out at IKEA
Capitalizing on the viral popularity of People of Walmart blog (previously on Neatorama here), there’s a new blog called the People of IKEA.
While that’s nifty and all, there’s an even stranger IKEA phenomenon: Chinese people love to go there, not to shop, but simply to hang around!
With no plans one Saturday, Zhang Xin told his wife, son and mother to wear something smart and hop into the family sedan. He could have taken them to the Forbidden City or the Great Wall, but he decided on another popular destination — IKEA.
Riding an escalator past a man lying on a display bed with a book opened on his belly, the clan sauntered into the crush of visitors squeezing onto the showroom path, bumping elbows and nicking ankles with their yellow shopping trolleys.
Zhang said the family needed a respite from the smog and a reliable lunch.
"We just came here for fun," said the 34-year-old office manager. "I suppose we could have gone somewhere else, but it wouldn’t have been a complete experience."
Welcome to IKEA Beijing, where the atmosphere is more theme park than store.
David Pierson of the LA Times has the intriguing story: Link – via Look At This
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Monkey-picked Tea
You can buy tea that has been picked from the bush in China by monkeys! The idea is that the rare and delicious strain of wild tea grows on steep hillsides that humans cannot reach. From the product page:
Legend has it that monkeys were first used to collect tea ten centuries ago, because upon seeing it’s master trying to reach some tea growing wild on a mountain face, the monkey climbed up the steep face and collected the tea growing there and brought it down to his master.
Monkey-picked tea is now harvested in only one small village in China. Link -via the Presurfer
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The Hair Village
The Long Horn Miao women of Soga Village sport a traditional hairstyle that puts Marie Antoinette’s ‘do to shame!
We watched three women show us how they made their amazing big hairdos (and I thought my hair was expandable!). They started with pieces of wood dowels, stuck them through their own hair… then start wrapping lots of artificial looking “hair” (really long black pieces of yarn) around the wood to make the hair stand out, finishing with long strips of fabric which decorated this intricate, ornate wig. This must eliminate ever having a “bad hair day.”
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Colonel Sanders Long Lost Sister Found in China
There’s something very familiar about the logo of the Ji’a'po fast food chain in China …
Ji’a’po is a fast food chain founded in 2007 and now there are about a hundred stores in China. What make people impressed the most about this chain however is the logo, as it looks so much alike as KFC’s one.
Netizens in China start making fun of these two nearly identical image and calling Ji’a’po is the lost sister of Colonel Sanders from Kentucky Fried Chicken.
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Red Pandas Adopted by Farmer's Dog
When rare red pandas in China were abandoned by their mother, zookeepers looked high and low for a wet nurse. The farmer’s dog pictured was one of three candidates for the wet nurse position.
“No one knew she was pregnant. Her plump body and bushy hair disguised her protruding belly until the babies were born,” said Ha.
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Armless Motorcycle Rider
When police officers in Shandong, China stopped a motorcycle for being overloaded, they found a surprise: the rider has no arms!
Liu, 27, lost both arms at the age of seven after an electric shock. When he was 10, his parents sent him to a local circus to learn skills, and from then on, he trained himself to ride a motorcycle without arms.
Police officer Xhang Jie said: "I spotted from a distance that the motorbike had three adults on but we were all stunned by what we saw when we got closer."
Liu admitted that he had been riding his adapted motorcycle for 10 years without arms – and he didn’t even have a license.
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Tianzi Hotel
The three men in this picture are Fu Lu Shou, which means good fortune, prosperity, and longevity. But in this version they are a ten story building! Tianzi Hotel is in Hebei Province, China, and holds the world record for being the “biggest image building”. See more pictures at Killer Directory. Link -Thanks, David!
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13-story Building Topples
You don’t want to be around when a high-rise apartment building falls over! The unfinished 13-story building in Shanghai toppled Saturday morning and killed a 28-year-old worker.
“It was just like an earthquake,” witness Zhang Supong told China Daily.
Construction of the building has been halted pending an investigation of the collapse, including reports that cracks had appeared Friday on a flood prevention bank near the apartment building, Xinhua reported.
Link to story. Link to pictures. -via J-Walk Blog
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Tiananmen Square Anniversary
People around the world are marking the 20th anniversary of what became known in China as the June 4th Incident. In April of 1989, students and intellectuals gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of communist party secretary Hu Yaobang, who advocated government reform. The gathering grew into an anti-government protest and lasted until June 4th when government forces cleared the square. Official Chinese records say 241 died in the incident, but the Chinese Red Cross initially put the figure at 2,600. Frontline aired a 2006 documentary about the protest and its aftermath called The Tank Man. That episode is now available online, along with a timeline and other features. Link -via Metafilter, where you’ll find more links
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Escape From North Korea
The heavily guarded Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea is impossible to cross alive, so if you want to escape from North Korea, you have a better chance taking the more circuitous route of sneaking into China, and then slowly and cautiously making your way across the country to freedom in South Korea.
But this route presents plenty of obstacles. Defectors have 2,000 miles of China to cross, and if they are discovered by Chinese police, they will be deported in handcuffs and chains back to North Korea, where they will spend 10 years doing hard labor in a prison camp.
Writer Tom O’Neill went undercover to meet some of these North Korea defectors hiding in China, and reported their stories (with names & escape routes changed) in this article in the February issue of National Geographic.
Some 50,000 North Korean escapees are thought to be hiding in China, many of them virtual prisoners of exploitative employers who can blow the whistle on them at any time if they protest. Many of them never make it to South Korea.
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Bullet Removed After 42 Years
65-year-old Hou Guoying recently had a bullet removed that had been lodged in her face for 42 years! She was shot accidently during the Cultural Revolution in China in 1967.
The bullet apparently hit her when it ricocheted through a wall during a fight in between rival factions of Red Guards.
But doctors initially told her that her wound was only superficial, the Chongqing News reported.
Constant headaches and difficulty eating eventually led to an x-ray in 1978 that revealed the bullet.
She had refused an operation because of poor medical facilities in Chongqing at the time – resulting in three more decades of discomfort.
This year, the pain began to spread to the rest of her body, so the bullet finally came out. Hou is recovering from the surgery. Link -via Arbroath
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The Longest Way
[YouTube - Link]
Christoph Rehage had a plan: to walk from Beijing, China to his home country Germany. In November, 2007, he started walking. A year later, he walked 4,646 km (2,887 mi) to Ürümqi – and though he didn’t complete his original route, the amazing journey had transformed him.
This is a time lapse of pictures taken through his trip. You can read more about Christoph’s journey at his website, The Longest Way.
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Cheaters Jailed on State Secret Charges
Sure cheating is bad, but when a single exam has the power of controlling your destiny (as China’s "gaokao" or college entrance exam does), the pressure to do well can be too much.
To make sure that people don’t cheat on their exams, the Chinese government has jailed 8 parents and teachers caught in a cheating scheme on charges of stealing state secrets!
The Legal Daily newspaper said the parents began plotting in 2007 because their children’s achievements were "not ideal". One group bribed a teacher to fax them the test paper and paid university students to provide answers, which were transmitted to the children through earpieces. The ruse was discovered when police detected "abnormal radio signals" near the school.
Another man had created an even more elaborate – and expensive – system. He bribed a student to send him the questions using a miniature scanner and hired nine teachers to answer them. He then sent their work back to his son and the other boy. A teacher was also jailed for charging parents to deliver answers to students. The equipment he used failed on the day.
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The Beauty of Molten Iron
In Nuanquan, China there is a unique tradition dating back about 500 years to celebrate the Lantern Festival. Instead of using fireworks like any old place – or that the fact that fireworks were invented in China back in the 12th century – these folks celebrate it by using something a bit more dangerous and beautiful with molten iron which is then flung at a wall creating a cascade of sparks. What do they use for protection? Sheep skins and a hat…
**I highly recommend watching this clip by clicking on the High Quality button to really enjoy it!
via – Gizmodo
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China Calls for a New Global Currency
Is this the beginning of the end of the dominance of the US dollar as the world’s preferred currency? The global economic crisis and the erosion in the value of the dollar has led China of all countries to call for a new "international reserve currency":
[People's Bank of China] Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan’s essay did not mention the dollar by name but said the crisis showed the dangers of relying on one nation’s currency for international payments. In an unusual step, the essay was published in both Chinese and English, making clear it was meant for an international audience.
"The crisis called again for creative reform of the existing international monetary system towards an international reserve currency," Zhou wrote.
A reserve currency is the unit in which a government holds its reserves. But Zhou said the proposed new currency also should be used for trade, investment, pricing commodities and corporate bookkeeping.
Beijing has long been uneasy about relying on the dollar for the bulk of its trade and to store foreign reserves. Premier Wen Jiabao publicly appealed to Washington this month to avoid any steps in response to the crisis that might erode the value of the dollar and Beijing’s estimated $1 trillion holdings in treasuries and other U.S. government debt.
Link (Photo: World Economic Forum [Flickr])
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Leaning Tower of Shanghai
Surely you’ve heard of the Great Wall of China, but how about a Leaning Tower? Turns out, China’s Huzhu Pagoda may just be the most tilted building in the world, beating out the Leaning Tower of Pisa …
The Huzhu pagoda leans over Tianma village in Songjiang suburb, its seven-story structure so lopsided it seems in imminent danger of toppling over altogether.
It was built in 1079 — well before Italy’s famous Leaning Tower of Pisa — by Gen. Zhou Wenda to house five Buddha relics given to him as a reward by Emperor Song Gaozong of the Southern Song dynasty. But from the start, it began to tilt.
“Part of the foundation was built on rock, part of the foundation was built on mud,” explains Yang Kun, who works at the Songjiang Museum and has studied the pagoda’s history.
Link [Update 3/13/09: reader beware: the website (NPR.org of all places) may have trojan in a rogue ad]
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Chinese Woman Put Her Life Online
Beijing resident Chen Xiao was tired of making plans for her life and having them ruined by natural, economic and personal disasters. So she decided to hand over her personal decision-making to China’s hundreds of millions of Internet users.
"I figured if other people came up with things for me to do, I might stumble upon something new and better."
Web users, known in China as netizens, have been finding plenty of things for Chen to do, from delivering pet food, to caring for stray cats, to taking a hot lunch to a homeless man, to attending the birth of a child. And she’s been able to make money at it, charging about $3 an hour.
Chen won’t do anything illegal, immoral or violent, although she’s been asked.
“When people stop needing me, I’ll go back to my original life. But I don’t know when that will come.”
– Chen Xiao
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Disneyfied China
The Harbin Winter Festival, one of the oldest winter festivals in China, used to be a frozen wonderland of indigenous charms: a Qing dynasty ice palace, snow dragons, the Forbidden City sculpted in snow.
But this year, a Disney licensing company is taking over operations from the local communist government. It’s the first time a private company has run the ice festival.
So instead of candles flickering in ice lanterns in front of a frozen replica of an ancient pagoda, Harbin now has Cinderella’s castle with an escalator and neon lights, and people posing for photos with ice sculptures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Sometimes it’s a too-small world after all.
Photo by StrudelMonkey
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Giant Rat Caught in China
A six-pound rat was caught in Fuzhou, Fujian, China. The ratcatcher is Mr. Xian, who grabbed the rat after he saw a crowd gathered around it.
He told local Chinese newspapers that he thought the rat might be a valuable specimen, or a rare species, and had to muster up his courage before grabbing its tail and picking it up by the scruff of its neck.
“I did it, I caught a rat the size of a cat!” he shouted out afterwards, according to the reports. Mr Xian is believed to still be in possession of the animal, after stuffing into a bag and departing the scene.
The rat had a 12-inch tail and teeth and inch long! Forestry officials who saw pictures think it’s a Chinese bamboo rat, which rarely grow over ten inches long, but cannot be sure until they examine the rat itself. Link -via Arbroath
(image credit: News 163)
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Bike Washing Machine: Pedal Your Clothes Clean
A middle-school student in Guandong province in China figured out a way to run a washing machine without electricity.
He rigged up a washing machine to a stationary bicycle and pedaled until the clothes were clean. He demonstrated that you can wash your clothes, keep in shape, and protect the environment at the same time.
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Smoking Toddler
[YouTube - Link]
I feel awful for the life this child has ahead of him. Addicted at 2, he’ll probably lose his voice by 15 and have cancer by 20.
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Shepherd Uses Photo of Wolf to Herd Sheep!
No sheepdog? No problem! This Chinese shepherd found that he could control his flock of sheep with a poster of a wolf!
Du Hebing, of Xi’an, told Huashang Daily that he shot the picture by chance.
"After visiting Qinling Wild Animal Park, on the way home I saw a group of sheep walking along the road with a man holding a picture following behind them," he said.
Du said he burst out laughing when he realised it was a picture of a wolf. "The man was using the wolf picture to scare the sheep and drive them ahead – it was a really funny scene," he said.
Link (Photo: Du Hebing)
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