'Calabash Grandpa' Cuts Down His Seven Gourds, Ending the Viral Saga That Overran His Riverbank
Ten days after an elderly couple in Shaoxing became China's favorite viral neighbors, the man known as 'Calabash Grandpa' cut down the seven gourds that made him famous, saying the crowds on his unrailed riverbank had become unsafe. The farewell — a song, a wave, and 'you can all go home now' — closes a story that began with an open door.
On Friday evening, by the light of phone torches on the far bank, the man China knows as "Calabash Grandpa" used a long pole to bring down the seven bottle gourds that had made him famous, one by one, and carried them indoors. A video still of the moment was captioned, plainly, "Shaoxing's Calabash Brothers finally meet their ending."
The gourds were why the crowds came. As we wrote last week, the couple in Shaoxing became a national sensation after passers-by noticed seven gourds growing in a neat row on the vine outside their window — an accidental living replica of "Calabash Brothers," the 1980s animation every Chinese child knows, in which an old man raises seven magical gourd boys. The couple, it emerged, had lost their only child years ago and lived behind a door kept shut for two decades, until strangers began calling at it. "I treat them as my own family," the grandfather said of the visitors then.
The fame outran the goodwill. Tourists and livestreamers gathered on the opposite riverbank daily, shouting for the grandfather at mealtimes and past midnight; neighbors complained of the noise. The couple had planned to leave the gourds hanging until Frost Descent, a month away, to make the beauty last. Instead, a witness told the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald, the grandfather cut them all down on Friday night because the bank was held up by a single rope with no guardrail, and a crush of people there "could easily end in an accident."
He did not seem bitter. After the last gourd came down, he and his wife sang "Our Life Is Full of Sunshine," a song from a 1979 film, and waved the crowd away — "散了吧，谢谢大家," "You can all go home now, thank you, everyone." "Understand them," the witness wrote. "Peace and quiet, with no disturbances, suits them well."
The fortnight in between had taken on a carnival logic of its own. A cosplayer famous for playing the Snake Spirit, the villainess of the same cartoon, traveled from Tianjin to sit theatrically by the river — "The Calabash Brothers pressed me down for 9,999 years, and I'm finally out!" — a scene that climbed Baidu's own hot list the day before the ending. And an older video resurfaced from a year before, showing just two gourds on the same window and a grandfather greeting strangers unprompted; commenters noted that the light in his eyes then was not what it became. That, too, made Baidu's trends, along with a wish repeated across the comments: that the couple should not be left lonelier than before once the internet moves on.
The vine by the window is bare now, and the little sign that hung beside it — "Please do not make loud noises; the Calabash Brothers are resting" — has come down with them.