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, Lanzhou bans tattoos for drivers, Tang palace uncovered, a shatteringly handsome man goes viral, and TV stars inadvertently pick protected fungi:

Sexual bias

The prestigious China Academy of Art in Zhejiang province has drawn online ire after its Freshman Safety Knowledge Handbook suggested that female students are to blame to sexual harassment directed against them. The handbook claimed that women have weak minds, love money, and can’t resist seduction.

Tattoo taboo

Officials in Lanzhou, Gansu province, banned taxi drivers from having tattoos to avoid “making passengers uncomfortable,” stipulating that any drivers who already have tattoos must get them removed. The policy follows the central government’s 2019 ban on showing tattoos on television, citing them as a symbol of “low tastes.”

Fed to the wolves

A mother was blacklisted by Beijing Zoo after she helped her children feed grass and other unsuitable foods to wolves in their enclosure. The zoo has condemned the woman’s “uncivilized” behavior and added a new fence reinforced with rocks to the wolf enclosure.

Shattering good looks

After suffering injuries due to his glass shower door shattering, an ordinary resident of Ningbo suddenly became an internet sensation—for his looks. Last week, Mr. Zhang complained on local news program 1818 Huangjinyan that his property management company still refused to pay his 8,000 RMB medical bill. The story suddenly leaped to the top of Weibo searches, and the hashtag “Zhang Cut His Hand on Shower Door” has been viewed over 1.6 billion times on Weibo. “Zhang is so handsome that [the accident] must not have been his fault,” one commenter gushed.

Rigorous recruitment

The Bank of China went viral after details emerged of its rigorous four-hour recruitment exam for bank tellers, which tested candidates on logic, language, advanced math, and astronomy. Netizens joked that the bank should have been recruiting for a president or highly skilled scientist rather than a teller.

Not a fun-gi

Stars of reality show Go Fighting received criticism for picking the endangered fungus Saussurea medusa on camera. One of the shows’ stars, Liu Yuning, and the producer later explained that the fungus was a prop, but experts have continued to suggest it was real, and local authorities are currently investigating the case.

Poetic palace

Archeologists in Shaanxi province recently confirmed that the ruins of a Tang dynasty palace they have been excavating since 2008 on in suburban Xi’an is the “Ligong Palace” depicted in Bai Juyi’s famous poem “Song of Everlasting Sorrow”: “The Ligong Palace rises in the clouds, where music from heaven plays everywhere.” The ruins, located in the Lishan Mountains, are the best-preserved example of terrace architecture from the Tang dynasty yet to be discovered.

Table tennis tears

A video showing a 3-year-old girl in Jiangsu province playing ping pong while crying has drawn amusement as well as alarm. Though distraught, the girl still hits every ball without fail. Her father stated that his daughter is learning table tennis voluntarily, and that he is merely teaching her perseverance.

Root poetry

Middle school language arts teacher Liu Hanguo from Xiangyang, Hubei province, has spent 35 years sawing and arranging 5,000 pieces of twisted tree roots into calligraphic characters, and composing them into wall-to-wall displays of poetry.

Cover image from VCG