25 Interesting Facts About China

1. Google offers free legal download of music in China, in partnership with the largest record labels in the world (since 2009).

2. All pandas in the world are on loan from China, and when a baby Panda is born, by agreement, it is sent back to China to help expand the gene pool. The baby pandas are shipped back by FedEx.

3. There is a “cult” offshoot of Christianity in China that believes Jesus is currently living in China as a Chinese woman.

4. China is said to suffer from the worst brain drain in the world. 7 out of 10 students who enroll overseas never move back to live in China.

5. Pencils are yellow because, in the 1890’s, the world’s best pencil graphite came from China. In China, the color yellow is associated with royalty, so American pencil manufacturers started painting their pencils yellow to indicate they contained high-quality Chinese graphite.

6. There is a counterfeit egg industry in China, and one person can make approximately 1500 of them per day.

7. Tickling was a form of torture used in ancient China on nobility because it left no mark and recovery was quick.

8. When McDonald’s first introduced drive-throughs to China, the concept was so foreign that many people would pick up their food through the drive-thru, park their cars, and bring the food inside the restaurant to eat it.

9. Despite spanning five time zones, all of China runs on Beijing time. Sunrise in the city of Kashgar/Zhongquo (in Western China) officially occurs as late as 10:17 AM.

10. During WWII, Japan bombed China with fleas infected with bubonic plague.

11. There used to be fake Apple stores in China. Even the staff were convinced that they were working for Apple.

12. Rich people in China hire body doubles to serve their prison sentence.

13. Brad Pitt was banned from ever entering China because of his role in Seven Years in Tibet.

14. A man in China has kept himself alive with a homemade dialysis machine for 13 years.

15. In ancient China, they used Mannequins to lure the enemies to shoot arrows, which they later pulled down to get free supply of arrows.

16. In 2006, China slaughtered 50,000 dogs after three people died of rabies. Dogs being walked were seized from their owners and beaten to death on the spot. Owners were offered 63 cents per animal to kill their own dogs before the beating teams were sent in.

17. In 1946, during a land survey of Sichuan province in China, a forester encountered a tree he had never seen before, so he took a sample. He came to find it was as yet unknown to science and only existing as a fossil. It came to be known as the ‘Dawn Redwood’.

18. A forbidden love in China between a young man and older widowed woman forced the couple to live in a mountain cave. Over the course of 50 years, the man carved a 6,000 stairs into the mountainside so that his wife could easily descend from the cave.

19. Elgoog.com (Google backwards) has a huge following in China because because elgooG search terms are printed in reverse, so users are able to perform Google searches without detection by the Chinese government’s search filters.

20. 2 ancient cities in China were drowned in 1959 by a man-made lake and were forgotten about, until they were discovered in 2001 by a tourist diving company. The cities remain intact and in good condition.

21. China has planted the biggest artificial forest in the world to stop the spread of the Gobi desert, and plans to expand it to 2,800 miles by 2074.

22. Chinese smoke around 2.2 trillion cigarettes a year, of which 400 billion are fake, made mostly in illegal cigarette factories in caves below a city in China, often containing 80 percent more nicotine, 130 percent more carbon monoxide and occasionally insect eggs and human feces.

23. An estimated 10,000 cats are eaten per day in China’s Guangdong province.

24. China set up state-sanctioned protest zones for the 2008 Olypics and then arrested people who applied to use them.

25. A museum in Hebei Provence, China, was shut down earlier this year after the majority of its 40,000 artifacts and antiques were discovered to be fakes.