Viral Week is our weekly round-up of the weekend’s trending memes, humor, rumor, gossip, and everything else Chinese netizens are chatting about.
This week, netizens sell snow messages, exotic birds go astray, panda poop attracts tourists, and a pop star turns weatherman:
Written in the snow
Snowy weather in northeastern China presented a unique business opportunity to online venders—selling messages written in the snow. At a cost of around 5 RMB for six characters, sellers will seek out pristine powder, write a custom-ordered message, and send photos and videos to the customer or their loved ones.
Lost flamingo
On November 16, a potentially confused flamingo was found in Liaoning province, in China’s far northeast, the highest latitude one has ever been spotted at. When the same bird was witnessed again last week, a local bird protection volunteer speculated that the bird “had low IQ” and got lost when separated from its flock.
Bones in the bathroom
A Shanghai apartment renovation revealed a secret compartment atop the toilet containing human teeth and bones, connecting the late former owner Miao Mou, who had a history of drunken violence (as well as subletting to his drinking buddies to pay off debts), to the murder of a man reported missing in 2015.
Plastic life
New owners of apartments in Changsha were disappointed to find that the “park views” and “vegetation” promised by developers turned out to be nothing more than some blue plastic laid on concrete in a poor attempt to replicate a lake, complete with a fake bridge over the “water”.
Divine forecaster
A promotional video for the China Meterological Administration cast Taiwan pop star Jam Hsiao as a weather forecaster in a humorous nod to Hsiao’s nickname, “Rain God”, due to the supposed tendencies of cities to experience rain when he gives a concert there.
When you gotta go…
When an elderly man had a medical emergency during his flight from Guangzhou to New York, two Chinese doctors came to his aid—using straws, syringe needles, and an oxygen mask to siphon urine out of his enlarged bladder.
Panda poop-star
Visitors to Wuhan Zoo lined up to smell the fresh feces of the giant panda, as love for the national animal reached new heights. The project was launched to give visitors the opportunity to experience the poop’s scent, which unsurprisingly has a faint bamboo fragrance, staff at the zoo explained.
Pretentious pigs
Two brothers paraded an entire pig carcass doing “the splits” on top of their pick-up truck around Beijing. Netizens decried the stunt as an ostentatious show of wealth, while the Beijing public security bureau’s Weibo wrote, “Trucks under 1000 kg are not allowed to carry cargo higher than two meters off the ground…Uncomfortable to look at and illegal, not good!”
Di–registered
A Shanghai graduate student is struggling to enroll as the national online graduate student database only included the traditional version of the rare character in her name (頔, dí). Buying travel tickets online has also become a problem for her. Meanwhile, using rare characters has become trendy among some parents.
TCM Controversy
Eight traditional Chinese medicine colleges in China were delisted from the World Directory of Medical Schools (WDMS) for not providing teaching programs that qualify graduates for practice outside China. Zhang Boli, president of Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (one of the eight delisted), attributed it to “lack of communication with the WDMS.”
Cover image from VCG
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