By DA FEIJI
Lifestyle Correspondent

A migrant archaeologist finds just what he was looking for on Monday

XIAN (China Daily Show) – Call it the ‘Fifth Invention.’ Brothels and erotic scrolls, belonging to a previously undocumented ruling dynasty, have now been sensationally unearthed in central China, experts say.

The new evidence suggests that the world’s oldest civilization may have also invented the world’s oldest profession – a claim that the ruling Communist Party has moved swiftly to refute.

“For a full list of our inventions, please see the document on Xinhua [news agency] entitled the ‘Four Inventions,’” a spokesman said yesterday.

But growing archaeological evidence suggests that Middle Kingdom madames were likely the first.

The long-forgotten Swing Dynasty (385-380 BC) was an epicurean court in a society primarily devoted to endless warfare, according to a team of day laborers working time-and-a-half in the city of Xian.

“The Swing didn’t see the point of constantly falling out with each other,” claims Professor Eimen Von Häffenmast, visiting Professor of Archaeology at the University of Guttenberg, who is closely monitoring the dig. “These johns preferred to make love – not war. Spears, for example, were considered objects of love, rather than conflict.

“Consequently, this highly creative community didn’t stand a chance.”

In the course of their short-lived but immensely popular reign, the Swing are said to have invented the terracotta dildo, proper erotica, the water-calligraphy bed and tabloid journalism – all over a five-year period, during which almost everyone got laid and no one died.

The Swing’s young and well-endowed ruler Long – who contemporaneous scrolls describe coyly as the ‘She’long Emperor’ – apparently established his kingdom half-way through the year 385BC, in the middle of a brief lacuna when marauding rival tribes had simply agreed to take a breather.

Emperor Long supposedly died happy, after choking on ground tiger-bones

Historians are unsure as to the exact origins of the dynasty, however.

The Swing are believed to have been descended from the Jin, who first quarreled with the Han, Zhao, and Wei dynasties but then made alliances to destroy the Zhi – a move later endorsed by the Zhou, but not before the Zhao attacked the Wei, after they had appealed to the Han for some help against the Chu.

In the resulting confusion, the Swing were able to quietly slip in and rule, legalizing polygamy and establishing a successful franchise of upmarket brothel-spas.

The brief interregnum was known colloquially as the ‘Whoring States Period.’

“China often reminds the world of its 5,000-year history and now we are starting to see the real fruits of that,” claims von Häffenmast. “We have also found evidence of a three millenia-old recipe for Kidney Surprise and definitive proof, finally, that syphilis originated somewhere in Henan.”

The She’long Emperor was regarded by his subjects as a laid-back, generous and giving ruler, and is depicted in recently unearthed statues as a long-haired dude, fond of making lewd hand-gestures.

But despite the brevity of its rule, one of the Swing’s major innovations – an equalized system of sexual barter, grounded in Legalism – would later took deep root in the national psyche.

Indeed, von Häffenmast claims, the legacy of the She’long’s rule lives on today – in China’s many neon-lit urban barbershops, attended by smiling peasant girls.

Working tributes to Emperor Long’s flowing locks and fondness for paid sex,  von Häffenmast assures, “can continue to be found in every city, down countless darkened alleyways – which are still also very good places to get some.”

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By LAO SHOUXING
History Correspondent

Lord Shang (390-338 BC) enjoyed the occasional slay ride

XIAN (China Daily Show) – He may be as American as apple pie and as much a part of Christmas as the latest Call of Duty but according to one scholar, the real Santa Claus was actually Chinese.

Using information found in his attic, and backed-up by extensive research online, historian and sanitation worker Lin Kang has traced Santa’s history to 223 BC – and the Middle Kingdom.

Lord Shang Ke was an ancient figure, famous as the first man to codify China’s legal system in his Book of Law. Santa Claus is most likely a Roman bastardization of ‘Shang Ke’s Laws,’ Lin believes.

Said to have roamed the country during the early Qin Dynasty, dispatching “bribes to those who were naughty and punishments to those who were nice,” Shang is revered in schools today as the father of Chinese autocracy.

But the draconian Shang was also famed for ramming dissenting scholars into chimneys and roasting them alive, and enslaving Japanese tourists – or “dwarf people” – to do his bidding.

Lin says these traditions were spoilt by Westerners, who instead made Shang – or “Santa” – an avuncular figure, whose elf-run workshops deposit Japanese-made electronic goods on the hearths of well-behaved children.

“Shang ran a sweatshop and he ran it good,” said Lin. “The irony is the tradition has now come full circle. We churn out cheap, lead-based goods to be consumed by gullible foreign children. As a consequence, we’re  the world’s number-one export economy. Shang would probably have approved –but if he didn’t, he’d have chopped your head off.”

The real-life Shang was eventually executed after falling out of imperial favor, and supposedly torn asunder by horses. Lin speculates this might explain the “reindeer thing.”

The tradition was most likely stolen during the chaotic civil war that followed the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Lin says. Visiting executives from the fledgeling Coca Cola Company allegedly paid 400 taels for the recipe to an ancient medicinal brew called kela – the story of Lord Shang was later appropriated by the firm’s Shanghai advertising department.

“Foreigners stole our land, our precious artifacts and our tyrannical historical figures,” Lin lamented. “They can keep the vases but we want the good stuff back.”

Shang’s modern ancestors have announced they intend to sue Coke for copyright infringement but IPR lawyers suggest the family may be willing to settle the case for a large quantity of Sprite.

And while some experts have questioned the veracity of the claims, Lin says documents proving his theory have been authenticated by none other than historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Gavin Menzies.

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By LAO SHOUXING
History Correspondent

Queues are rare in modern China, but when they do form, etiquette demands they be as intrusive and uncomfortable as possible

HENAN (China Daily Show) — Archaeologists excavating a site near the Shang Dynasty (1766-1050 BC) capital of Yinxu made a startling discovery this week, when fossilized remains of a trio of Chinese citizens, apparently in the form of a line, were sensationally uncovered.

Dr. Charles Whitmore, visiting paleontologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, says the discovery represents “a paradigm shift in our understanding of the Chinese people.”

The scientific community has long believed Chinese people to be “genetically unwilling to file singly,” Whitmore explained. “But this discovery suggests we may have been wrong and that they may have once been willing to form a line quite patiently.”

“To think that perhaps as recently as 3,000 years ago, the average Chinese might have possessed the faculties to align his – or herself – directly behind another flies in the face of everything we’ve assumed,” Whitmore continued. “Today, such linear audacity by the Chinese is only observed in excruciating military processions and firing squads.”

Millennia of sociological research has reinforced the original conclusion, most recently in the notorious 1994 Tsinghua University “Bus Stop” experiment, where students were asked to remain in single-file as a bus, driven by researchers, pulled up. The researchers then watched as the 12 students pushed, jostled and trampled each other on to the vehicle, even though it was empty and had ample seating.

The discovery is being hailed by Western scientists as an anthropological milestone tantamount to the Java Man and the Chauvet cave paintings and could cause researchers in other areas of Sinology to rethink scores of cherished theories, including the controversial suggestion by Whitmore that large swathes of early Chinese may have enjoyed lunch at “any random interval of time between, say, eleven and three?”

One Harvard history professor has claimed for years to have written evidence of a Ming Dynasty dinner party that “didn’t end awkwardly and abruptly just before ten.”

There is little consensus, however, among Chinese academics, who remain skeptical about the findings. “I don’t think we can rush to conclusions here,” Beijing Normal University professor Shi-mian Maifu told China Daily Show. “There may be some other explanation.  Maybe they were performing a dance, or playing some sort of practical joke. We just don’t know.”

Shi-mian, a noted scholar of Chinese ethics and author of seven university textbooks, urges Westerners to “stand still” and “remain calm” in the face of “sudden excitement.”

“I cannot believe that any reasonable, sane Chinese person would choose to purposefully increase the time he or she spends waiting out of deference to someone else,” said Shi-mian. “I just can’t stand behind that line of logic.”

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By XI MEITI
Western Media Correspondent

Snow thrust an autographed snap into one startled secretary's hands before rushing off to 'wire a telegram'

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – Attempts by the Chinese government to attain international journalistic credibility by cloning legendary former US reporter Edgar Snow four years ago went horribly awry, according to CIA disclosures yesterday.

The redacted documents refer to a highly confidential 2006 project to replicate various deceased Western journalists who had expressed sympathy for the Chinese Communist Party during its formative years.

But the experiments, which took place in China’s northeast Heilongjiang Province, were said to have misfired badly, with reports of the “Snow 2.0” clone rampaging through Propaganda Bureau offices in search of a 1937 Remington typewriter and attempting to file “hot copy” to US publications that no longer existed.

“Sweetheart, get me a rewrite!” the author of Red Star Over China (1937) reportedly screamed into a telephone on the desk of an uncomprehending female Propaganda Bureau clerk. Her game of Happy Farm was instead interrupted by “a strange foreigner babbling about an exclusive interview with Mao Zedong in something called the ‘Saturday Evening Post’,” according to the report.

Edgar Snow, who died in Geneva in 1972, was an American journalist who achieved “foreign friend” status in China for his flattering portrait of Mao Zedong’s early leadership. He faced growing criticism from Western peers after other works, including 1963’s The Other Side of the River, dismissed the idea of a famine in late-1950s China and increasingly presented a romanticized view of that period. The Great Leap Forward (1959-1961) saw some 70 million Chinese die of starvation as a result of misguided agricultural policies enforced by the government.

Snow 2.0 was reportedly cloned with DNA extracted from remains taken from his grave at Peking University. Its headstone calls Snow “An American friend of the Chinese people, whose feelings he rarely, if ever, hurt.”

The project was part of a long-running experiment that included several failed attempts to reproduce deceased Western Chinese sympathizers, such as Canadian doctor Norman Bethune and US writer Pearl Buck, as well as a panda with “US characteristics.”

A refined version of Thomas Friedman, known as ‘Friedman MK 4,’  was believed a partial success after extensive testing. However, MK 4 then went “seriously off-message” during a mock studio debate about green-energy policy and had to be shot by the host, one of six Tian Wei clones, all believed to be “highly stable, handy with a pistol but otherwise useless.”

“Despite very much effort to bring him into the 21st century, it seems Snow 2.0 was unable to advance anywhere beyond the Long March era,” said Professor Lin Yifan, a former expert at the secretive Cloned Foreign Friends of China Studies department of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who defected to the US in 2007. Much of the CIA report is based on Lin’s testimony.

“It seems he was very much always wanting to publish interviews and insight regarding old events, and also shamed many when he naughtily referred to both Soong Mayling [Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader’s wife] and Jiang Qing [Madame Mao] as ‘hot tomatoes with the cat’s pajamas’ with whom he wanted to ‘hold the presses,’” Lin’s testimony concludes.

The Snow clone is no longer believed to exist, having been humanely destroyed after referring to a visiting intelligence officer’s wife as “toots Tantan.”

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By ZOU MIAO
Fashion & Style correspondent

Mao’s hair is almost unique in geopolitical history but has long baffled physicists

BEIJING (China Daily Show) – China’s ruling Politburo have surprised hairdressers by formally admitting that the style sported by former Communist Party Chairman and father of Chinese Communism Mao Zedong is now “unfashionable.”

A Ministry of Culture press release, issued shortly after New Year’s Day, stated that the bizarre bob-cum-combover Mao wore from the early 1930s was “70% completely right and 30% just plain wrong” and the Party officially discourages today’s youngsters from trying to emulate the distinctive style.

The remarks reflect the attitudes of a rising generation of young Chinese, who increasingly prefer the spiky haircuts sported by Korean and Taiwanese pop stars to the Bactrian camel-effect made popular by the late Communist leader.

“Mao’s look was originally conceived as a bold break from the conservative, scraped-back and unimaginative queues and crew-cuts worn by Nationalist government figures,” said noted philanthropist, historian and Sinologist Sir William Buckfast.

“Chiang Kai’s haircut in particular was deeply unpopular among large swathes of the provincial population and looking at it today, one can see he was practically bald.

“By contrast, Mao’s cutting-edge back-combed double-parting immediately bought him vital credibility with the peasantry during his early years of struggle,” Sir William added.

“The worst excesses of the Great Helmsman’s hairstyling came during the decade of chaotic social upheaval known as the Cultural Revolution,” Sir William told China Daily Show. “During this time, Mao’s long-standing barber, Quentin Li Feng, was purged and his fourth wife, Jiang Qing, gave him all his fashion advice. This is what led to the unfortunate ‘undersized headphones’ look we remember him for today.”

Mao experimented with several looks during his early political career, including a mullet, cowlick and, most controversially, a 1911 pompadour before settling on his now-classic cut.

Although the Party insists this was a carefully conceived Marxist ‘do, historians believe it was in fact necessitated by the Red Army’s famous Long March of 1934, when the future Chairman would often face days without access to a hairdryer and had to fashion combs from beaten-flat shell casings.

“This style was probably considered fine then, as there was a war on,” said celebrity British hair stylist Nicky Clarke, who recently visited China for the first time. “But you can’t treat your hair the same way in peacetime. When the fighting stops, hair needs care and attention – gentle conditioning and minimal blow-drying – to achieve long-lasting and pliable results.”

While popular support for Mao’s topiary has been in steady decline since the 1970s, the Party line has until now rigidly supported the style as “the grandfather of Chinese haircuts.”

The new ruling is thus seen as a move by present-day leaders to distance themselves from a form of personal grooming increasingly at odds with contemporary Chinese values.

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