China’s long history and modern life have produced stories that are strange, inventive, and sometimes unsettling. In this collection, two bank managers try to repay stolen money with lottery winnings, two sets of identical twins keep a restaurant open for 21 hours a day, and a convenience store hangs from a cliff. Ancient customs, mythical creatures, and remarkable people round out these 50 more bizarre facts about China. Catch up with Part 1 and Part 2.
1 Sun Yaoting China’s Last Imperial Enuch
Sun Yaoting, the last surviving eunuch of China’s imperial court, was castrated by his father at age eight without anesthesia. While he recovered, China’s last emperor abdicated, and the country became a republic. Sun died in 1996, but he could not be buried with his preserved genitals as a “complete man”: his family had thrown them away during the Cultural Revolution, fearing persecution if they were found.
2. In 2005, Chinese lottery ticket seller Zhao Liqun discovered that a flaw let him buy tickets with the winning numbers for five minutes after the results were announced. He repeatedly exploited it and had friends and neighbors collect the prizes, claiming 28 million yuan ($3.76 million). After authorities uncovered the fraud, a court sentenced him to life in prison and confiscated his property.
3. Because eight is considered lucky in Chinese culture, a man in Zhengzhou reportedly spent one million yuan, about $145,000 at the time, on a license plate reading “88888” for his pickup truck. On his first day using it, police stopped him eight times because they suspected the unusually valuable plate was fake.
4. In 2010, a division of China’s People’s Liberation Army began training 10,000 messenger pigeons to carry military communications if war disabled modern systems. The birds were expected to fly at speeds of up to 75 mph (120 km/h) while carrying loads of up to 3.5 ounces (100 g).
5. In 2016, Lady Gaga was reportedly added to a Chinese Communist Party list of “hostile foreign forces” after meeting the Dalai Lama in Indianapolis to discuss yoga, meditation, and mental health. A Hong Kong newspaper reported that Chinese authorities ordered websites to stop distributing her music.
6 China Eastern’s 300 Lounge Meals
A man in China bought a refundable first-class ticket on China Eastern Airlines and used it to enter the VIP lounge at Xi’an airport for free meals. For nearly a year, he repeatedly postponed his flight, changing the booking more than 300 times and returning to eat without flying. When the airline investigated, he canceled the ticket and received a full refund.
7. For the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Chinese authorities designated three parks where people could apply for permits to protest. They received 77 applications and approved none. Some applicants were detained or went missing after seeking permission; two elderly women were sentenced to a year of re-education through labor after applying.
8. In 2015, Chinese police found a 24-year-old woman known as Xiao Yun, whom her family had presumed dead after she vanished a decade earlier. She had left home at 14 after an argument with her parents and spent the intervening years playing CrossFire, sleeping in internet cafes and bathhouses, and surviving on handouts and occasional cashier work. Police found her during a routine check at an internet cafe and contacted her parents.
9. During China’s Ming Dynasty, practitioners blew powdered smallpox scabs into healthy people’s noses. The practice, called variolation, usually caused a milder infection that left survivors immune. It still killed an estimated 0.5-2% of recipients, compared with a reported 20-30% mortality rate for smallpox acquired naturally.
10. Tu Youyou’s discovery of the malaria drug artemisinin drew on a roughly 1,600-year-old Chinese medical text. Its instructions for preparing sweet wormwood led her to suspect that boiling damaged the active ingredient, so she tried a low-temperature extraction. After successful animal tests, Tu and two colleagues tested the extract on themselves before giving it to patients. She received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery.
11 Lanmaoa Asiatica Mushroom’s Miniature Hallucinations
A popular mushroom in China’s Yunnan province, Lanmaoa asiatica, can cause “lilliputian hallucinations” when undercooked. People have described seeing tiny humanlike figures slipping under doors, climbing walls, and clinging to furniture. Researchers have yet to identify the compound responsible.
12. China accounted for about 46% of the world’s cigarette sales when a 2023 investigation reported that more than 2.4 trillion cigarettes were sold there each year. Nearly half of Chinese adult men used tobacco, compared with fewer than 2% of women. The state-owned China Tobacco supplied almost the entire domestic cigarette market; in 2022, its profits and taxes generated $213 billion for China’s central government.
13. In China, some families ask doctors to withhold a cancer diagnosis from the patient because they fear the news will cause psychological harm. In a 2018 survey of 180 physicians in Shandong province, 98% said they would discuss the diagnosis with the family first, and 82% said they would withhold it if the family asked.
14. When David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II reached China in 2017, so many viewers streamed or downloaded it through Tencent Video that reports said the surge temporarily slowed internet service.
15. For centuries in China, young girls’ feet were broken and tightly bound to create “lotus feet.” The coveted “three-inch golden lotus” was associated with beauty and status and, in some areas, improved marriage prospects. The practice caused lasting pain and could severely limit mobility.
16 Asia’s 12,000 Bile Farm Bears
There are 12,000 bears on bile farms across Asia. Extracting their bile involves surgery to insert a catheter or create an opening through the abdomen. A 2011 estimate valued the worldwide trade in all bear parts, including bile, at $2 billion. Bear bile is widely used in traditional Chinese medicine.
17. A Chinese entrepreneur named Tao Huabi grew up in poverty in rural Guizhou and became one of China’s richest women through her Lao Gan Ma chili sauce. As a widow raising two sons, she served homemade chili sauce with the noodles and tofu she sold from a food stall. Customers liked the sauce so much that she launched it as a brand in 1996.
18. After his two-year-old son Guo Xinzhen was abducted in 1997, Guo Gangtang spent 24 years searching across China. He exhausted his savings, fell into debt, and wore out 10 motorcycles before police used DNA evidence to reunite them in 2021. During his search, he also helped reunite more than 100 other abducted children with their families.
19. There is a popular conspiracy theory in China that says that much of the history of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt was fabricated. In 2024, art history professor Huang Heqing argued that ancient Greek sculptures and buildings were too refined to be genuine.
20. Pixar’s Coco reached Chinese theaters without cuts despite its story about a boy meeting his dead relatives. Chinese film rules restrict depictions of ghosts and the supernatural, but the film’s focus on family and honoring ancestors may have helped it gain approval.
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21 Tiananmen’s Disputed 10,000 Death Estimate
In 1989, Chinese officials said about 200 civilians died during the military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests. A British ambassador’s cable, declassified in 2017, recorded an unnamed Chinese official’s estimate of at least 10,000 civilian deaths. The true toll still remains unknown.
22. In 2015, a Chinese tech company reportedly hired three women as “programming cheerleaders” to bring breakfast, chat, and play ping-pong with its programmers. Its HR manager described the programmers as mostly male and poor at socializing and claimed the new hires improved their motivation and efficiency.
23. China requires adult children to attend to their aging parents’ emotional needs and visit them regularly. That year, a court ordered a woman to visit her 77-year-old mother at least once every two months. A person who defies such a court order could be fined or detained.
24. Chinese scientists announced in 2018 that they had cloned two crab-eating macaques, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, using the same nuclear-transfer method that produced Dolly the sheep. They were the first primates cloned by that method, though an earlier monkey had been cloned by embryo splitting. There are no longer any significant scientific barriers to a form of human cloning apart from ethics.
25. Qin Er Shi, China’s second Qin emperor, was treated as the “Son of Heaven” whose face and voice should be hidden from his ministers. This treatment left them little access to him without his powerful adviser Zhao Gao present. After three years on the throne, Zhao Gao forced him to die by suicide at age 22.
