The f*cking monkeys at the temple took my money

Sure, your wife/husband/partner might slap you, but assure them that this is not a fanciful excuse, because it could really happen to you.

If you were at Long Hua Temple on the 5th day of the new year, which was Thursday, you would encountered huge crowds of people and a miasma of incense. People go to temples and set off firecrackers that day in order to entice the god of wealth (财神) to work some of his magic.

Combine this with another phenomenon we've see around town—a roving bunch of guys that have 3-4 chained monkeys by their side who do flips, shoot baskets, and catch knives for money—and you get the situation described in this report (in Chinese). Several of the monkey men sidle up to you and wish you a new year, and ask if you want to give some money to the monkey, who will do a trick for you and wish you good luck for the new year. The reporter then asked them how much they usually asked for, and one of the monkey fellows raises one finger. "One?" asks the reporter? "Are you joking," replies one of the monkey men, "One hundred!" One of the monkeys does a flip in the air and then walks up to the reporter and hugs his leg. "He won't let go unless you give him money," says one of the monkey masters.

What's worse is that there are three monkey masters and they surround the reporter, thereby tripling the sum owed to 300 RMB. Well, 300 RMB to watch some monkeys dunk a mini-basketball into a rusty hoop wasn't the reporter's idea of a good investment. The monkey trainers get suspicious, and seeing that the reporter has a camera, decide to take off.

The reporter then asks the folks that work around the temple about this matter, and they say that although they would like to get rid of these people, they don't know what to do about the monkeys. This is because the people in charge of maintaining order are not the police but rather the cheng guan, the boys in gray you see chasing people clutching unclosed suitcases of pirated DVDs down the street. They have less authority than the cops to make people bugger off, and furthermore, the monkeys are protected animals (not on the same level as pandas or other endangered species, but enough that there are many protected wilderness zones throughout China for these monkeys to eat bananas and smoke cigarettes in peace.

In this respect, their hands are tied. They might be able to confiscate illegal objects or items, but have no rules for dealing with monkeys.