With the Year of the Dragon on the horizon, we thought we’d take a look back at some of the weirdest, strangest and downright oddest news stories that have hit the web over the past twelve months. The Year of the Rabbit had its fair share of bizarre stories, and here are ten of the most extraordinary.

 

1)  Girl on Film (February 2011
The Year of the Rabbit had only just gotten started when a video "scandal" broke. Chinese netizens were simultaneously amused and appalled by the appearance of a clip purportedly made by a mother in an attempt to lure a husband for her unwed daughter. The girl, Gan Lulu, was filmed naked in the shower, and the clip subsequently went viral. As is often the case these days, Lulu and her mom became celebrities, appearing on Lady Gua Gua’s chat show. Capitalizing on her fame, Lulu even appeared at a motor show in December.

2)  Glowing Pork (April 2011)
Barely a month goes by without some sort of food scandal, and one of the worst last year was the case of the iridescent pork. A Shanghai woman surnamed Chen bought her usual cut of pork from a wet market on Yanggao Bei Lu. After using some of it to make dumplings, she retired to bed, only to wake in the night to an ethereal glow coming from her kitchen. It turned out that leftover pork was emitting a blue-green light. On inspection from the Shanghai Health Supervision Department, the pork was found to contain phosphorescent bacteria, but was deemed safe to eat if cooked.

3)  Exploding Watermelons (May 2011)
Another food scandal occurred a month later, as farms in Dayang City, Jiangsu, began to report bizarre cases of exploding watermelons. Twenty farmers and 115 acres of land were affected, with melons splitting apart left, right and centre. The blame was placed on overuse of a growth accelerator called forchlorfenuron, which caused the melons to overinflate during a period of wet weather. The ruined melons were given to pigs to eat…

4)  Bad Abbot (May 2011)
Is nothing sacred? In May, reports leaked online of Abbot Shi Yongxin from the Shaolin Temple visiting a prostitute in Henan Province. The temple – home of Shaolin kung fu – has been the subject of criticism for several years, receiving accusations of commercialisation, but the abbot’s actions cast a longer shadow. Keen to clear his name, Shi claimed that he had merely been administering Buddhist rituals to the prostitute.

5)  Tigger at the Zoo (June 2011)
Zoo visitors shared photos and videos online of scenes at Chengdu Zoo last summer, as zoo keepers and conservationists ran a training scheme to prepare for tigers escaping. For the sake of verisimilitude, two members of staff dressed in Tigger costumes posed as tigers during the exercise.

6)  Photoshop Blunder (June 2011)
An eagle-eyed netizen from Huili in Sichuan Province noticed something strange on the town government’s website. Accompanying an article about inspections of local roads was an appallingly Photoshopped image of three state officials levitating above the road surface. The original photograph was eventually dug out, and showed the officials inspecting a less-than-perfect road.

7)  Ouch… (September 2011)
Squeamish men, look away now. In Hubei’s Honghu town last year, a 53-year-old man named Zhang Nan found himself in an awkward position after a visit to a health spa. During a special treatment in which a bathful of eels nibbled away at his dead skin, Zhang became the unwilling host to a slippery friend. One of the eels – a six-inch beast – worked its way up Zhang’s urethra into his bladder, where it remained until surgeons at a local hospital were able to remove it.

 8) The Village Skyscraper (September 2011)
Dizzyingly tall buildings are nothing special in China, apart from when they spring up in the middle of rural villages. The Zengdi Kongzhong tower sits in the middle of Huaxi in Jiangsu Province, topping out at 328 metres to be the eighth tallest in China. Inside is an 826-room hotel with space for 5,000 guests. Until local tycoon Wu Renbao had his wicked way with local industry, Huaxi was a poor farming village of just 2,000 residents. It is now a hub of industry with a huge population of migrant workers. The Zengdi tower cost Wu three billion RMB to build, and contains a magnificent one-ton golden ox statue.

9)  Desert Storm (November 2011)
Conspiracy theories swirled online in November, as Google mapping images from 2007 were discovered to contain strange patterns in the sands of the Gobi Desert. Some believed the concentric circles to be a military base, given the sites’ proximity to the Ding Xin airbase; others thought the lines were mock-ups of American cities. The mystery gathered steam, but no satisfactory explanation has yet been given.

10)  Apples and Eggs (January 2012)
No year would be complete without some inexcusably weird behaviour surrounding the cult of Apple in China. Just recently, the scheduled launch of the iPhone 4S was postponed at Beijing’s Sanlitun Apple Store due to a crush of 2,000 people. Made up mostly of scalpers on a mission to mass-buy phones to sell on, the crowd waxed angry when denied the chance to snap up the coveted gadgets. Eggs were thrown at the storefront, and several people had to be dragged away by police. Some even ended up in hospital. Crazy.
 

Related links
Top 8 Inspirational Stories of 2011
How Bizarre: China’s Weirdest News Stories of 2010
Strangest China Stories of 2009… The Wrap Up

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Keywords: strange stories China 2011 odd news China 2011 Year of the Rabbit 10 strange Chinese news stories