Culture

Wei Dongyi, Peking University's famously ascetic math genius, listed two self-edited exercise booklets at 39.8 yuan on his Bilibili store, sold more than 26,000 copies and topped a million yuan in four days — then quietly removed the link on August 22. The vanishing act is a small, very Chinese story about what happens when a person the internet treats as above commerce is asked to sell something.

Tang Shizeng, the Xinhua war correspondent whose 1990s reporting from the Middle East made him one of China's best-known foreign reporters, died in Beijing on August 23 at 65. For 28 years he lived with aplastic anemia, a bone-marrow failure he himself linked to radiation exposure, and in his final months his white blood cell count had fallen to nearly zero.

Culture

A Taiwanese Actress Poured Oil on a Japanese National Treasure and Called It Prayer

A 39-year-old Taiwanese actress known for the youth dramas Zhongji Yijia and Zhongji Sanguo was arrested at Kansai airport this week, suspected of pouring glycerin on the 'Buddha's foot stone,' a Japanese national treasure at Yakushi-ji temple in Nara. Her explanation — that she pours oil to pray when moved by something — has turned a minor heritage crime into a story about impulse, borders, and the collision of private ritual with public protection.