China

A Chinese performance artist has locked himself up in a lion’s den to experience life as a caged animal, Xinhua news agency reported on Friday. Poet and performance artist Ye Fu, who once built himself a bird’s nest atop a Beijing building, locked himself in a lion’s cage on Tuesday in the eastern city of Qingdao.

A Chinese culture ministry official has denounced a university professor who stripped naked in front of students and teachers during an art class, a Chinese newspaper reported on Tuesday. Mo Xiaoxin, a 56-year-old assistant professor at a university in Changzhou, in eastern Jiangsu province, shocked students by stripping during a lecture on ”body art”.

China has shut down a Chinese magazine’s outspoken website, apparently because of the reported killing of a villager trying to stop demolition of his home, the editor said on Thursday. The online edition of the Baixing [People] Magazine, based in the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu, was closed on Wednesday, editor Huang Liantian told Reuters.

A woman said to be the tallest in the world has been fitted with new size-57 shoes from a German cobbler who travelled to China to meet her. ”If I’d known how poorly she was, I wouldn’t have taken the trouble to go there,” 54-year-old Georg Wessels said on Monday on his return from Anhui province where he met the 2,36m-tall Yao Defen.

Time is running out to reach an agreement on Tibet’s future which, if not sorted out by 2008, could become a blemish on the Beijing Olympics, a French parliamentary delegation said on Wednesday. The Dalai Lama, accused by Beijing of being a separatist, has lived in exile in the Indian hill station of Dharamsala since fleeing Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese Communist rule.

China may be giving striptease funerals the last rites after officials arrested five people and ordered an end to the practice, state media said on Thursday. Strip shows have been commonly used to attract more mourners to funerals, as villagers believe a crowded send-off brings more honor to the deceased, Xinhua news agency said.

A flock of hungry sheep gobbled up banknotes totalling 100 000 yuan ($12 500) that were the public funds of a northern Chinese village, state media reported on Tuesday. A farmer who was also the treasurer of Linjiawan village in Shaanxi province was devastated when he found out the cash he had hidden underneath his sheep pasture was mostly chewed up by the beasts.

The death toll in China from Typhoon Saomai rose by 106 to 436 on Friday with the confirmation of dozens more deaths in the eastern province of Zhejiang, state media said. All 106 new fatalities were in the coastal province of Zhejiang, which had previously reported 87 dead and 52 missing, Xinhua news agency said.

The death toll from the strongest typhoon to hit China in half a century has reached 319 and could rise further, Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday. Much of southern China has been battered by a series of typhoons and tropical storms this year that have now killed about 1 300 people.

The Beijing city government has turned down an undertaker’s application to send human ashes into space, state media said Friday. A funeral home’s proposal to charge 100 000 yuan ($12 500) each for sending two clients’ ashes into space was turned down on the grounds that there was no law regulating space burials, Xinhua news agency reported.

Nearly 500 000 people were evacuated from their homes in south-east China as the region, already suffering from two months of devastating weather, prepared for Typhoon Saomai to make landfall on Thursday. Saomai, with winds of more than 200kph, pounded Taiwan earlier in the day.

The Chinese — who lay claim to inventing paper — were using it 100 years earlier than previously thought, state press said on Wednesday following a new discovery of an ancient scrap of the material. The 10-square-centimetre piece of paper was found in north-west China’s Gansu province and is believed to have been made in eight BC.

Stressed-out Chinese can now unleash pent-up anger at a bar that lets customers attack staff, smash glasses and generally make a ruckus, a Chinese newspaper reported on Monday. The Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in Nanjing, capital of the eastern province of Jiangsu, employs 20 muscled young men as ”models” for customers to punch and scream at.

Tropical Storm Prapiroon swept across south China, leaving a trail of destruction with more than 70 people reported dead or missing by Sunday. ”It’s still raining heavily, and the situation is pretty serious,” an official said from the flood-control headquarters in Guangxi region, where the eye of the storm was located early on Sunday.

Tropical Storm Prapiroon killed 18 people as it lashed south China with heavy rain and winds on Friday after forcing the evacuation of more than half a million and snarling transport links across the region. State television showed pictures of huge trees uprooted by the roadside in the Guangdong city of Shenzhen.