A four-year-old pet pug named Xi Wa (Happy Boy) carries his owner’s shopping in a small cart in Changsha, capital of southern China’s Hunan Province. Picture: Quirky China News / Rex Features
The AKC may have to expand the Working Dogs category.
![thedailywhat:
Underground Hotel of the Day: “Under construction” has taken on new meaning for a new luxury hotel outside Shanghai — 16 of the 19 floors are being built below ground level in an abandoned quarry. The 380-room InterContinental Shimao Wonderland, whose deepest floor will house a restaurant that will actually be underwater at the bottom of the quarry, is expected to open by late 2014 or early 2015.
[businessinsider]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2ol443z0P1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
Underground Hotel of the Day: “Under construction” has taken on new meaning for a new luxury hotel outside Shanghai — 16 of the 19 floors are being built below ground level in an abandoned quarry. The 380-room InterContinental Shimao Wonderland, whose deepest floor will house a restaurant that will actually be underwater at the bottom of the quarry, is expected to open by late 2014 or early 2015.
Why Is This Huge Chinese Mall Empty?
The giant mall you see above didn’t die. It has never lived, having been nothing but empty since it opened seven years ago. According to its Wikipedia entry, it has an astounding 2,350 available retail spaces, only 47 of which are occupied.
Meet the world’s largest shopping mall, the New South China Mall in Dongguan, China. It is twice as big as the huge Mall of America outside Minneapolis. […]
The mall has 7,100,000 square feet (163 acres) of leasable floor space and 9,600,000 square feet (220 acres) of total space. Wikipedia reports that “the mall has seven zones modeled on international cities, nations and regions, including Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Venice, Egypt, the Caribbean, and California.” It has a replica of the Arc de Triomphe, another of the bell tower of St. Mark’s in Venice, and a 1.3-mile canal with gondolas.
What the New South China Mall (the owners added “new” to the name two years after the opening) doesn’t have is people or business.
Read more. [Images: Wikimedia Commons, Remko Tanis/Flickr]
"The nie nie zu (the “crush-crush tribe”) are so named because they go into supermarkets and take out their frustration by standing in the aisles crushing packets of instant noodles."
— theeconomist: Who knew China was tribal? The diversification of Chinese society has seen a flowering of a new vocabulary. Perhaps most fascinating has been the division of people into tribes (zu in Mandarin).
(via theeconomist)
Pollution over China can be seen from space
Fog and haze blanketed the North China Plain on January 10, 2012, making travel difficult. The Beijing airport cancelled 43 flights and delayed 80 more in the morning hours, when visibility dropped to 200 meters, according to state news reports. Provinces across the plain reported low visibility.
The haze decreased visibility in satellite images too. A milky, gray pall entirely blocks the ground from view in the top image, taken in the early afternoon by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite. Patches of white fog or low cloud hang below the gray haze. Winds had already begun to push the haze out of Beijing in the north, but the rest of the North China Plain still suffered from poor air quality. By the next day, when Aqua MODIS acquired the lower image, skies were mostly clear across the region.
Yikes!
Happy Year of the Dragon!
Dragon’s Breath (by Legohaulic)
Abandoned fake Disneyland in China — Lost At E Minor: For creative people
Am I the only one who finds this kind of spooky?
(via madthoughts)
This is fairly meta.
Here’s what’s been going around the Layar inter-office email today: an amazing perspective street-art drawing of Lego men. We call it “analog augmented reality.” :)
(via notational)
"If you’re retired, single and looking for love in Shanghai, try IKEA. Twice a week, hundreds of Shanghai residents who have formed an informal lonely hearts club of sorts, gather at the cafeteria of the Swedish furniture mega-store for free coffee and conversation."
—
At IKEA In Shanghai, Do-It-Yourself Matchmaking (via npr)
Third spaces, in unexpected places.
(via npr)
Today in Beijing: Air pollution reached “so high compared with the standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that it was listed as ‘beyond index’.”
(via kateoplis)
Forever Bicycles by Ai Weiwei, who’s been named the most powerful artist of 2011, from Ai Weiwei Absent exhibition which opens at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum tomorrow.
via kateoplis
Over the past decade or more, Shanghai has grown like no other city on the planet. Home to 13.3 million residents in 1990, the city now has some 23 million residents (to New York City’s 8.1 million), with half a million newcomers each year. To handle the influx, developers are planning to build, among other developments, seven satellite cities on the fringes of Shanghai’s 2,400 square miles. Shanghai opened its first subway line in 1995; today it has 11; by 2025, there will be 22. In 2004, the city also opened the world’s first commercial high-speed magnetic levitation train line.
“Shanghai Gets Supersized.” — David DeVoss and Lauren Hilgers, Smithsonian Magazine
![thedailywhat:
Everybody Needs A Hobby of the Day: Talk about cheap: A woman named Ma Jei told tourists visiting China’s Zhonghau Castle that she scaled its 70-foot wall to avoid paying the 4 dollar admission fee.
The 48-year-old, who stormed the castle without so much as a safety harness, says she has climbed the wall many times in the past, having grown up in the area.
According to reports, several tourists who attempted to mimic Ms. Jei were either injured in the process or had to be rescued by police. “She ran up the wall like a goat and made it look easy,” said an onlooker. “But when people tried it for themselves they saw it wasn’t quite as simple as they thought.”
[dailymail / metro.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsyqhqS8CH1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
Everybody Needs A Hobby of the Day: Talk about cheap: A woman named Ma Jei told tourists visiting China’s Zhonghau Castle that she scaled its 70-foot wall to avoid paying the 4 dollar admission fee.
The 48-year-old, who stormed the castle without so much as a safety harness, says she has climbed the wall many times in the past, having grown up in the area.
According to reports, several tourists who attempted to mimic Ms. Jei were either injured in the process or had to be rescued by police. “She ran up the wall like a goat and made it look easy,” said an onlooker. “But when people tried it for themselves they saw it wasn’t quite as simple as they thought.”
(via npr)
Saturday morning baby panda cuteness.
A group of panda cubs napped earlier this week at a nursery in the research base of the Giant Panda Breeding Center in Chengdu, located in Sichuan Province. China is trying ot determine how many of the endangered animals live in the wild with its once-a-decade panda census. The last count found 1,596 pandas left in the wild, with the majority in Sichuan.
Photo: STR/AFP/Getty Images
