The Chinese just can't seem to get enough when it comes to tampering with goldfish. Who can forget the live goldfish keychains last spring or the goldfish whisperer's synchronized fish performance which can only be described as "magnetic"? Now these sprite little swimmers, viewed as tokens of wealth in Chinese culture, are being tattooed with symbols said to bestow fortune upon their masters. more ›

The 2nd Annual Beijing 798 International Tattoo Convention took place last weekend, with tattoo artists from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, North America, and Europe on hand to sell their services to the public, and to compete in a variety of different tattoo design competitions. more ›

This scandal has been pretty much everywhere on the Chinese internet this week, and China Hush took the liberty of translating the story into English. It goes something like this: Man gets suspicious of wife, ties up wife, and cuts the word "degrading" (other translations could be "low" or "cheap") into her face to make her less attractive to other men. Worse of all? He says it was "her own choice." From China Hush: more ›

• Chinese Army opens (small) window on operations [CSMonitor] "Foreign reporters this week got a rare peek inside an infantry base of the People's Liberation Army (PLA). At the same time, officials were reportedly putting the final touches to a bilingual PLA website that is due to go live on Aug. 1, the 82nd anniversary of its foundation. Taken together, these efforts are designed to signal greater transparency by a 2.3 million-strong military whose rapid expansion has stirred unease among other foreign powers, including Japan and the United States. But these baby steps seem unlikely to silence the debate over China's military capacity and how it intends to use it in future."
• Hidden Gobi Desert relics found [BBC] "Rare Buddhist treasures, not seen for more than 70 years, have been unearthed in the Gobi Desert. The historic artefacts were buried in the 1930s during Mongolia's Communist purge, when hundreds of monasteries were looted and destroyed."
• The last tattooed women of the Dulong people [China News Wrap] "The Xinhua News Agency website has a headline photo story about the the last women of the Dulong people in China’s Yunnan province - one of China’s smallest and remote ethnic groups - to have traditional facial tattoos. According to the news story, the custom of facial-tattooing amongst China’s Dulong ethnic group is first described in historical records from the Tang Dynasty (7th to 10th centuries C.E.)."

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